At 31 weeks pregnant, Shelly Wright began to mourn the loss of her unborn daughter.

She had been in what was supposed to be a routine doctor’s appointment. She’d brought her 3-year-old, Hudson, with her so she could run errands afterward.  Her to-do list was as long as you’d expect for a mother-of-three-and-expecting-one-more-soon.

She was stopped cold, though, when an ultrasound didn’t check out. She came to learn that it revealed a rare condition that caused her baby — a daughter she planned to name Genevieve — to retain fluid in her body. Fluid that was twisting Genevieve’s tiny heart 90 degrees, forming around her brain and constricting her delicate lungs.

Shelly is a nurse, and she knows the words doctors use and the faces they make when things did not look good.

“I didn’t think she was going to survive,” said Shelly, of Lincoln, Neb. “All I could do was pray for a miracle. My parents showed up in my living room when we got home, and that’s exactly what we did.”

Shelly said it took prayer, a lot of skilled doctors and nurses — and countless blood donors — to ultimately help save Genevieve’s life, who her mother said had been given a 2% chance of survival. She received daily infusions of blood components and seven full transfusions before being discharged from the NICU more than two months later.

‘The We Give Blood Drive’

Stories like Genevieve’s are why Abbott partnered with the Big Ten Conference this college football season to tackle a nationwide blood shortage that is the largest in a generation in the U.S . “The We Give Blood Drive” was our inaugural competition to see which school could inspire the most blood donations among students, fans and alumni. During college football season, the nearly 20,000 people who donated blood as part of the competition helped to save as many as 60,000 lives.

Nebraska donors showed up for Genevieve nine years ago — and they showed up again this year. The University of Nebraska-Lincoln inspired the most blood donations of any school in the Big Ten in the inaugural competition. Winning the competition with the most donations, the university received $1 million from Abbott to advance student or community health.

The real winners, of course, are the people in the communities surrounding these universities like Genevieve, who is here today because of the generosity of blood donors.

‘Our Little Fighter’

Genevieve’s path to her healthy, normal, 9-year-old life wasn’t easy.

When the Wright family gathered in the living room to pray, Shelly missed a phone call from Los Angeles. They were willing to try a procedure on her baby girl in utero, which involved placing chest tubes into her tiny body via long needles inserted through Shelly’s abdomen and into the amniotic sac.

Shelly and her husband didn’t think — they acted. Eight hours later, they were driving to a hotel in Los Angeles at 2 a.m., having left their three older children with grandpa and grandma at home. It was a Hail Mary, but one they knew that had to take.

Surgeons performed the procedure twice — the tubes clogged the first time (and the second), but managed to get enough fluid out of Genevive’s body to send Shelly and Dave back to Nebraska. Genevieve was born at 33 weeks — 4 pounds, 12 ounces.

Despite everyone’s expectations, she lived — but there was a whole lot wrong, and the team started working on her intensively every day.

“There were so many moments during the first few months of Genevieve’s life where we almost lost her,” said Shelly, fighting back tears. “Every single day she was having fluid drained via tubes and was receiving blood transfusions and components of blood to keep her alive. She is our little fighter.”

Genevieve fought — and ultimately, 65 days later, she won and was discharged home. Today she plays on her basketball team, sings in the choir and has no problem telling you exactly what she thinks.

When it comes to the blood donors who showed up for her when she was just a baby — and the nearly 4,000 Nebraska fans, alumni and students who donated blood this college football season, saving up to 12,000 lives — her thoughts were clear and simple as she teetered in her seat, one leg crossed under her: “I would just say — thank you.”