Middle school teacher honored for giving blood
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IDAHO FALLS — A middle school teacher was honored by the American Red Cross Thursday as the organization’s 2018 “East Idaho Blood Donor Hero.”
Jeremy Plothow teaches at Taylorview Middle School and has been donating blood for at least a decade.
“The price of orange juice is very high lately and they give it to me for free afterwards,” Plothow says with a laugh. “Honestly – to me it’s literally the least I can do. I just sit in a chair and they poke me with a needle and somebody benefits from it. So why the heck wouldn’t you do it?”
As a child, Plothow was a blood recipient after surviving a bad accident and now he participates in a blood drive held at his school every year.
“When you have these horrific events, where suddenly lots of blood is needed and could save people’s lives, it’s very easy to see the sacred responsibility we have to each other to do that,” Plothow says.
Plothow says he’s not doing anything special and when he learned he was being honored as a hero, he was brutally honest with his response.
“It’s an absurdity,” he says. “You can’t say no to it because someone wants to give you an award but the idea of getting an award for sitting here and giving blood for half an hour – it’s a little insane.”
Plothow received one of 11 awards in different categories that the Red Cross presented during a luncheon at the Hilton Garden Inn in Idaho Falls.
He says he will continue to donate his time and blood for others in need as long as he can.
“It takes an hour of your time and God forbid something happens to me, I would hope that someone would have been good enough a few weeks earlier to sit here a half hour and get some free orange juice out of it so I could live another day,” Plothow says.
EDITOR’S NOTE: EastIdahoNews.com is teaming up with the American Red Cross of Greater Idaho to honor ordinary individuals who have done extraordinary things to help others.
The 11 winners of the 2018 East Idaho Real Heroes awards were announced March 8. Each day EastIdahoNews.com will profile a different winner.
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