Power of plasma cited.

Two months ago, Paul Basaldua knew nothing about plasma donation.

These days, he’s an ardent crusader for its medical benefits.

COVID-19 has a way of changing your outlook on things and shifting your priorities.

Basaldua, 41, is one of the lucky ones, and he knows it.

A land developer who grew up on the West Side, graduated from St. Mary’s University and just launched his own company last December, Basaldua woke up on a Tuesday morning in mid-March feeling achy, feverish and fatigued.

Two days later, he learned that he had contracted the coronavirus.

“My symptoms were pretty mild,” Basaldua said. “I was pretty much done with it after six or seven days. Then it just took getting enough energy to go be active outside, my normal self.”

While Basaldua quarantined at home, his wife, Kelly, a pediatrician, suggested that he start thinking about donating blood plasma so his antibodies could be used to treat patients battling

COVID-19 and help them fight off the virus.

Around the same time, he received a call from a friend whose uncle was in deep physical distress with the virus. She wondered if Basaldua would be willing to donate plasma to help her uncle.

“He was on a ventilator and 85 percent oxygen assistance,” Basaldua said. “My friend said, ‘Hey, have you heard about this plasma stuff ?’”

That’s where Basaldua’s crash course in the powers of convalescent plasma began.

Basaldua contacted BioBridge, the strategic partner of the South Texas Blood & Tissue Center. At the time, the Food and Drug Administration required that plasma donors be at least 28 days removed from any symptoms — or 14 days if they had a negative lab test in hand. (The FDA has since loosened that standard to 14 days without symptoms and no negative test required.)

By the time Basaldua was eligible to donate, his friend’s uncle already had received plasma from someone else. But Basaldua’s commitment to plasma donation was already locked in.

“One thing is giving it to somebody you know or whose family you know,” he said. “That’s rewarding, obviously. But another is just giving it to somebody in your community who will hopefully recover from the virus.”

Basaldua has made three donations so far (with another one planned for next week).

Over those three visits, he has donated a total of 12 bags of plasma, which translates to treatment for 15 patients.

“It’s not blood, where you feel really, really weak afterward,” he said. “They take the blood out of your body, they pull the plasma out of it, then your blood goes back into another bag so that the blood can clot. Then they put it back in your body.”

Basaldua’s friend Mayor Ron Nirenberg touted the land developer’s first donation with an Instagram post that featured Basaldua holding all the 200milligram bags of plasma he had filled that day.

Nirenberg thanked Basaldua for his “generosity” and encouraged San Antonians who have recovered from COVID-19 to follow that example.

“Your plasma,” Nirenberg wrote, “may be able to be used to help others fight off the disease.”

At this point, with no COVID-19 vaccine or clinically proven medication to treat the virus, convalescent plasma therapy looks like the best available hope for critically ill patients.

While health professionals are still in the process of learning how COVID-19 patients respond to plasma transfusions, Basaldua believes that the anecdotal evidence is promising.

“If you hear the anecdotes from the doctors at the plasma donation center, they’re telling me, ‘The first three people that got it were at death’s door, they got it and all of them were out of the hospital within two weeks,’” he said. “It’s amazing.”

In recent weeks, Basaldua has made it his mission to spread the word to those, like himself, who have recovered from COVID-19.

He sees the growing political rancor between those who preach caution when it comes to reopening the country and those who are anxious to return to their pre-COVID lives.

He sees plasma donation as an issue that cuts across partisan lines, a piece of what will prove to be a complicated and difficult strategy to transition our way back into something approaching normalcy.

Basaldua’s argument is that if we can build a formidable plasma bank for COVID-19 patients, it can at least reduce the sense of fear and helplessness that so many people are feeling.

“I think at this point it’s time to start talking about hope, because hope wins,” he said. “And I think plasma provides that hope.”