Ballet West used Tuesday’s blood drive in Salt Lake City to bring attention to the national blood-supply crunch and honor rehearsal director Pamela Robinson. Robinson, who has spent more than 40 years with the company, survived leukemia treatment that included two bone marrow transplants and 67 consecutive days of platelet transfusions.
A Diagnosis That Demanded a Donor
According to FOX 13 News Utah, Robinson received a donor transplant after her 2021 diagnosis, but it failed to produce blood in the marrow. She underwent a second transplant and then received daily platelet transfusions for 67 days. Robinson said she had been given two and a half years to live without a transplant.
Her exact disease was chronic myelomonocytic leukemia, or CMML, a rare blood cancer that affects roughly 1 in 100,000 people and severely impairs the body's ability to produce normal blood cells, according to Ballet West. The 67 straight days of platelet transfusions were not incidental to her recovery; guidance for stable hematology/oncology patients recommends prophylactic platelet transfusions once a patient's count drops below 10,000 per microliter.
Friends and Fellow Dancers Step Up
The drive also drew support from people in Ballet West’s orbit. FOX 13 reported that Nanette Chertudi, Robinson’s childhood friend, donated blood. Tyler Gum, a Ballet West principal artist who plays the title role in the company’s current production of Dracula, said supporting Robinson through the drive meant a lot to him.
Robinson's own creative output never fully stopped during her medical ordeal. While undergoing leukemia treatments and recovering from two bone marrow transplants, she choreographed The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, a new full-length ballet for the company's Family Classics Series that premiered in March 2026, according to the Salt Lake Chamber. She has said the creative work gave her purpose while she was recovering from treatment.
Why Platelets Can't Wait
Robinson's case illustrates a medical reality that blood banks live with daily: human platelets have a strict shelf life of just five days and cannot be manufactured synthetically, meaning hospitals depend on continuous daily donations to treat patients undergoing bone marrow transplants and intensive chemotherapy, according to the American Red Cross. For patients like Robinson, a blood bank's inventory isn't abstract backup for emergencies; it's a day-to-day matter of survival.
That urgency arrives against a bleak national backdrop. The Red Cross declared its second-ever national blood supply crisis on July 27, 2026, after summer donations fell to a four-year low and type O-positive reserves dropped below a single day's supply, forcing the organization to limit distributions to hospitals nationwide, as Hoodline previously reported. The Red Cross alone supplies roughly 40% of the nation's blood supply, and its donor base has shrunk by 40% over the past two decades even as hospital demand is projected to grow 12% by 2030, with only about 3% of eligible Americans donating in a given year.
Utah's Outsized Role in the Blood Supply
Utah also has established blood-donation efforts. Hoodline has covered church-sponsored drives and blood-supply levels in the state. Ballet West’s Tuesday drive adds a local arts institution to those efforts amid the national shortage.
National alerts and Utah’s blood supply
The American Red Cross says the only previous time it declared a national blood crisis was in January 2022, a distinct earlier incident. The July 2026 alert described above was the organization’s second such declaration, according to the American Red Cross. ARUP Blood Services says all donations made through its service stay in Utah and that it is the sole provider of blood products and comprehensive transfusion medicine services for University of Utah Hospitals and Clinics and Huntsman Cancer Institute. Those details describe local distribution and provider coverage, but do not establish whether Utah currently has a shortage or show a local donor trend.
The timing dovetails with Ballet West's own season. Tuesday's drive coincided with the company's production of Ben Stevenson's Dracula, in which Gum plays the title character. Artistic Director Adam Sklute is in the midst of his 20th and final season leading the Salt Lake City company, having taken the helm in 2007 and first staged this version of Dracula in 2011.
