This week on the podcast, my husband Brett and I discuss our experience fighting the gay blood ban. Before we dive into that topic, we have to tell you all about sending off our puppies to training camp! We miss them so much.

My favorite thing this week is sweet tea Mio! Drinking plain water wasn’t working for me...

Then we talk about the first big project we started together- Banned4Life. We wanted to get the FDA to end the permanent gay blood donor ban. We didn’t want to boycott blood drives, so we raised awareness by getting eligible donors to donate on our behalf. Before we knew it, news stations were picking up the story, and we had a feature in Men's Health magazine!

In December of 2015 the FDA ended the lifetime ban. Now, there is still a 3-month deferral period that requires donors to abstain from gay sexual encounters.

So much progress has been made, but there’s still more work to be done. I’m working with One Blood (in partnership with LBGTQ+ centers) to get 2,000 gay and bisexual males to participate in the ADVANCE Study to present evidence to the FDA that even a 3-month deferral is unnecessary. Sign up at https://advancestudy.org/

You have the power to create change in your community.

Brett and I also read off some blood donor facts from redcrossblood.org you may not know!

To close out we read shoutouts submitted on my website nurseblake.com/podcast. Each week we will take on a new nursing topic and bring up questions and stories submitted by our listeners.

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