Chessa Adams knew about the importance of blood. Several of Chessa’s family members, including her mother and her grandparents, needed blood transfusions. As a nurse at Pikeville Medical Center, she saw the daily impact of blood because she had administered countless transfusions in the intensive care unit over the years.

But knowing and understanding are two different things, and even someone in Chessa’s position didn’t fully appreciate the power of blood until the need hit home with the birth of her second child, Emery.

After 20 hours of labor, Chessa had to forgo her plans for a vaginal birth and deliver Emery via C-section. On Nov. 8, 2025, with 30 seconds to spare until midnight, Emery was born happy and healthy, but in the hours after delivery, Chessa felt awful.

“Going in and seeing her in the room, she was not my daughter,” said Stephanie Ratliff, Chessa’s mother and a team supervisor at Kentucky Blood Center’s Pikeville location. “I’ve seen every freckle. I’ve seen every blemish on my daughter’s face. There was no color.”

Chessa knew she had lost some blood, but she chalked up her extreme fatigue to a full day of labor. When her lab work came back and she saw her hemoglobin had dropped from 12.4 to 9.1, the exhaustion made more sense.

“It was taking everything I had to just muster the strength to move from the bed to the chair to take care of my newborn baby and try to eat,” Chessa said. “I had no appetite. I was very sweaty. I was very weak, very lightheaded.”

As it turns out, Chessa had a uterine window, a severe thinning of the uterine muscle at the site of a previous C-section from her first child. When her physician cut into her uterus for Emery’s birth, it triggered a major bleed.

Chessa lost more than four pints of blood, nearly half the volume of an average female. Had she delivered vaginally, there is a high likelihood her uterus would have ruptured, putting her and her baby’s life in jeopardy.

“It was like daylight and dark,” Stephanie said. “She had color back in her face. Her cheeks were back rosy again. I knew then that I had my girl back.”

Stephanie’s daughter was back to feeling herself physically with a newfound outlook mentally.

“I have been a nurse for going on 10 years now,” Chessa said. “I’ve seen many, many, many times that people have needed blood. I have administered many units of blood. And I never really knew how those patients felt until that day.”

Spending years in the critical care unit at Pikeville Medical Center where she has seen patients need blood for just about every need there is, transfusing blood two or three times a shift is just another day. Chessa knows transfusion is never just a routine procedure, but when it’s so common – one in seven patients who enter a hospital will receive a blood product, according to Americas Blood Centers – even a nurse can feel disconnected from its importance.

“You don’t realize the impact that it’s having on that patient’s life because it’s just another day at work for you,” Chessa said. “For them, it’s the life-or-death moment. Or for them, it’s getting well enough to be able to say, “Hey, I’m OK, maybe I can get through this.’ ”

Chessa lived the latter, and it’s given her a new perspective on the many patients she’s helped over the years. Knowing how awful she felt at her blood levels, she can’t imagine the experience of the patients who were at levels lower than hers.

“Just seeing how the impact of those transfusions saved their lives is something that will be forever ingrained with me,” Chessa said. “I will always be an advocate to come and donate and give what other people need because I have seen it firsthand. I have been that patient. I have been the donor. I have been the administrator. And it’s just an amazing thing of how we can do one small task out of our day to help someone else.”