In the Netflix series Emily in Paris , Ashley Park, while playing the character Mindy Chen, once said, “It’s Paris, everyone’s serious about dinner.” Well, Park recently talked to me about something that everyone should be very serious about anywhere in the world—not just in Paris. And that is donating blood.

Park Received Many Blood Transfusions During Her Eight-Month Hospital Stay

That’s because blood donations helped saved Park’s life when she went through acute myeloid leukemia at age 15 during her sophomore year in high school. The now 35-years-of-age Park told me how she had to remain in the hospital for “about eight months and underwent six rounds of chemo. And throughout that, my treatment really heavily relied on blood and platelet transfusions.”

She even pointed to the scar that she still has from where the Broviac tube—which is is a central venous catheter—was “installed just so I could not always be poked and stuck. But I think that if it wasn’t weekly, then daily blood transfusions were a big part of my protocol and treatment.”

Park’s Acute Myeloid Leukemia Was A Cancer Of The Blood And Bone Marrow

That’s because acute myeloid leukemia—or AML for short—is a cancer of the blood and bone marrow. The bone marrow is that soft, spongy stuff in the center of many of your bones that serves as the factory for making different blood cells like white blood cells, red blood cells and platelets. The “leuk” in leukemia stands for white blood cells because those are the cells that grow abnormally and out of control in AML, where they end up crowding out the other blood cells in the bone marrow and blood, kind of like shoppers during Black Friday.

The word “acute” in AML is there not because there’s anything cute about this life-threatening cancer. Quite the opposite. “Acute” is for the fact that this type of leukemia tends to progress and worsen very quickly.

Indeed, Park quickly went from “feeling like, oh, I’m an adult now, in an invincible kind of state of mind,” where she was doing dance, theater and piano to having “a lot of bruises all over. I was starting to get very sick and tired. At one point, I started being late to all of my classes because I wasn’t able to walk fast enough.”

Since in Park’s words, “I’ve always kind of lived with humor, we all just thought it was kind of hilarious that I couldn’t get to my classes on time. So nothing ever dawned on me that this could possibly be cancer.”

It wasn’t until she felt ill and “kind of fainted” in a dance class that her dance teacher told “my mom, she thinks that I might be anemic. So we ended up waiting until the very end of my sophomore first semester to a couple days before Christmas break. It was the last day of school, and we went to the pediatrician, and then they took a blood sample. They said I had to go to the ER right away.”

Park’s AML And Its Treatment Led To The Need For Blood Transfusions

Those are words that you don’t want to here. The result was her marathon hospital stay after various tests eventually diagnosed her with AML. That’s not typical for someone of Park’s age at the time, especially since AML is most common among adults age 65 and older.

There are two reasons why most if not all patients with AML end up requiring multiple blood transfusions. One is the crowding of the bone marrow that makes it difficult for the marrow to produce enough health red blood cells. Two is the treatment for AML itself, which includes using chemotherapy to destroy the cancer cells. Such chemotherapy can end up being like a sledgehammer to all of the bone marrow, though, further decreasing red blood cell production.

The hospital stay was quite an isolating experience for Park—both literally and figuratively. The resulting bone marrow and immune system suppression left her very susceptible to infections that could quickly become life-threatening themselves. Therefore, the hospital had to keep most people and their cooties away from her. “I was isolated for about eight months,” Park recalled. “Besides my doctors and nurses, I could have one caregiver with me, not near me, but at least in the room with me. So my grandma would come at night and my mom would come during the day.” Again, not your typical experience for someone in her mid teens.

Eventually, though, after quite an ordeal during which Park had to live with the uncertainty of whether she’d survive, the treatments proved successful, leaving Park cancer free. As Park told me, “Now that I think about, wow, the hundreds of people who took 10 minutes to donate were a huge part of my life. Their generosity was part of my survival journey," the now 35-year-old Park added. "And I’m here today. I’m built up of their cells, you know?”

The American Red Cross Declared A Blood Shortage Crisis This Summer

You could say that’s a pretty hard “cell” for maintaining a good supply of blood. But, on July 27, 2026, the American Red Cross declared its second-ever national blood supply crisis after the number of blood donations had dropped to a four-year summer low. The Red Cross attributed this drop to the heat, poor air quality and the dozen or so ongoing food-borne illnesses that kept blood donors away over the Summer. This left the Red Cross in an OMG situation—including having less than a single day’s supply of type O positive blood for the U.S.

Now, while a shortage of something else like toilet paper may be messy bad, a shortage of blood is lives-threatening bad. There may be emergency alternatives to toilet paper—that admittedly may vary in appropriateness. However, the same is not necessarily true with blood. As a result of the shortage, many patients have had to wait for blood transfusions, which could mean the difference between life and death.

Park Has Partnered With The Big Ten’s ‘We Give Blood’ Competition

Blood transfusions helped Park eventually make it to the University of Michigan, where she earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 2013. From there she went on to her acting career that’s included playing Gretchen Wieners in the Broadway musical Mean Girls, which garnered her a Tony Award nomination, and of course her role in Emily in Paris , which just wrapped up filming its final season in Paris, naturally, right before I met Park in New York City. She also will have a new movie called Basic that will be coming out basically sometime in 2027.

Speaking of Basic , her experience both before and during the University of Michigan has led her to basically a big thing—namely partnering with Abbott for the Big Ten’s “ We Give Blood ” competition. And take a wild guess as to what this competition is about. Yes, it’s where the student and alumni bodies of the different Big Ten schools—which now includes the University of Michigan and 17 other schools—basically compete with each other to give blood. The school that wins the competition this Fall will then receive a windfall $1 million grant from Abbott.

Park emphasized how everyone’s been “touched by cancer in some way” and “25 percent of blood donations go to cancer patients.” She pointed to the current blood shortage crisis in the U.S. and said, “I think a quarter of the blood donations are people over 65 years old, which means that in a couple decades, we’re going to be really at a shortage." That means that college students are an important target for donating blood because “the fact that we have so many students who are first time blood donors, and almost all of them want to give it again because once you’re in the system, it’s like only 10 minutes [to donate more blood],” in Park’s words.

In other words, there are big reasons—certainly more than 10 or 18 of them—why it’s important to get new blood into donating blood. Since a single pint of donated blood can end up saving more than one life, upping the blood supply in a big way can help save thousands upon thousands of lives, just like it did Park’s.