Eileen Dalton doesn’t want a potted plant from her three sons for Mother’s Day.
She’d rather they each donate blood in her honor.
The Montchanin resident recently started a foundation, Give Blood for Your Mother, to encourage young people to become blood donors, eight years after she received a life-saving blood transfusion.
A regular blood donor, Dalton said it seemed ironic that she needed a blood transfusion after undergoing radiation and chemotherapy and then surgery to treat colorectal cancer in 2002.
“When you donate blood, you think about the recipient, but in a general way,” she said. “And here I was at the other end of the needle.”
After having cancer, Dalton was not permitted to donate blood anymore and said she missed it.
So last year, she e-mailed her three sons and asked them to donate blood instead of getting her a Mother’s Day gift.
One of her sons e-mailed back saying he had donated blood in her honor and Dalton thought that seemed like a great idea.
“The idea just stuck with me,” she said. “I don’t know one mother who wouldn’t want this particular gift from their kid.”
Dalton started the foundation to make young people aware of the importance of giving blood, she said, since the 20 to 35 age group tend to not be in the habit of regularly donating.
But statistics prove that once someone donates, they tend to keep giving blood, she said.
And the Give Blood for your Mother foundation is catching on.
The Blood Bank of Delmarva is running a promotion this month in which a donor can receive a free card to send to his or her mother saying the blood donation was in her honor.
Dalton also recently traveled to Boston to preside over a Give Blood for Your Mother blood drive at Harvard University’s Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority.
Though she’s unsure how the foundation will grow down the road, she’s hoping to do more of those types of blood drives in the next year, she said.
“I hope to start young people on the road to being blood donors,” she said.
For more information about giving blood in honor of your mother, visit www.givebloodforyourmother.com.
