Over the past five decades, David Bugbee has been drained 20 times over.

Not all at once, of course, but since Red Cross technicians have stuck a needle in his arm and removed a pint of his blood 204 times since he was a student in Manchester in the early 1970s, and since the human body contains about 10 pints of blood – well, you do the math.

While this is not a world record, Bugbee, 71, of Concord, has donated more blood than perhaps anybody else in the state, although it’s hard to be sure. Either way, it’s an impressive record that has helped hundreds of people over the years. Not that Bugbee considers himself heroic.

“When they put (the needle) in, I always look away,” he admitted. “After it’s in, I’m fine. But watching it go in? I don’t look.”

Bugbee is one of roughly 6.8 million people who give blood annually in the U.S. There are usually several collections happening throughout the state every day, with schedules easily found online.

The Red Cross says it provides about 40% of the blood products – each donation is separated into plasma, platelets and red blood cells to serve different purposes – that are used in hospitals, ambulances and emergency settings annually. Most of it comes from volunteers like Bugbee.

People have been collecting blood to give to patients for millennia but the practice only became widespread in the 20th century after we understood the different human blood types of A, B, O and AB, each with an RH factor that’s positive or negative – Bugbee is A-positive – and established the complex infrastructure needed to store and distribute blood to those in need, a process that was supercharged during World War II.

Since there’s no good artificial replacement for blood, we still depend on people like Bugbee to lie down every couple of months (the Red Cross says you have to wait at least eight weeks between donations) and have one-tenth of their blood supply removed.

It sound kind of scary, or at least painful, but Bigbee downplays that part of it.

“It has always been easy. The people are extra nice to you,” he said.

The whole process takes about an hour, including the check-in that involves questions about your medical and personal history – recent tattoo or piercing? Any prescription medications? Recent overseas travel? – and making sure the level of iron in your blood is high enough, probably the most frequent issue that makes donors get turned away.

“It’s a relatively simple procedure,” he said.

And there’s a bonus: They tell you not to do any heavy lifting for at least five hours after donating, so you get out of chores for the rest of the day.

Bugbee says he first donated when attending what was then the vocational-technical school in Manchester partly because as a child he had seen his father do it. Now retired, he kept up regular donations during his work as a highway design engineer for the state Department of Transportation which, like many employers, gave him the time to donate during work hours.

He says he tries not to be too much of a nag about getting other people to donate – “I’ve heard some pretty lame excuses” – but notes that walking around with a big bandage on your arm sends a message.

As for why to do it, he mentioned an incident at work.

“I had a woman come up to my desk and tell me her dad had been going through serious issues and needed a lot of blood. If it wasn’t for blood donors, she said, he wouldn’t have lived as long as he had,” he recalled. “That’s good to hear.”

David Brooks can be reached at dbrooks@cmonitor.com.