When Katie Boyd battled Covid-19 last month, it was a grind.
"I was so tired," she said with a sigh as she sat on her back deck with her four-year-old son, Thomas, and her husband, Jesse.
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She woke up on March 23rd with shortness of breath and a crippling tightness in her chest. Still, a week after she began exhibiting those symptoms, she pretty much kicked the insidious virus. Turns out, Katie has something akin to an uber immune system. So, when friends tagged this young outdoorsy mom in a Facebook post about Mayo Clinic's Convalescent Plasma Project, she was all in.
"I instantly went on there," she said with a smile. "And, then I filled out the form. I think it was like a day later that I ended up getting a call from the clinic."
Last Friday she donated her plasma for the first time. The nurse who took Katie's plasma donation explained to her that if the plasma was as antibody-rich as they hoped, she could be a lifesaver.
"She said if I did have the antibodies in my plasma, she said it could save two lives," she said excitedly. "Just to know that my donation can help save two other people that have the virus, you know, that have it worse than me, it just means a lot!"
Only a week has passed since that initial donation, so Katie still doesn't know what impact her plasma may have had. Plasma donations, though, can be made far more often than donations of whole blood, so Katie is hopeful she can be a regular, frequent, life-saving contributor to the Mayo Convalescent Plasma Project.