Please save my life... back Mirror’s donor law change
Jess needs kidney and pancreas
Hooked up for hours every day to a dialysis drip hanging from her coat stand, 30-year-old Jess Harris’s home has become more like a prison cell.
Until she can get the kidney and pancreas transplant she so desperately needs, this is her life – but she says it is hardly worthy of the name.
The first thing she does when she wakes up is dialysis. It is the last thing she does before she goes to bed. And it is all she thinks about in between.
She says: “This isn’t a life. My life is on hold until I get my transplant.
“To be able to live the life I’ve always wanted to live, the life I’m missing out on at the moment, would mean everything to me.”
Sitting beside her to hear her story, Shadow Health Secretary Jonathan Ashworth says he can hardly imagine what Jess has to endure.
They are supporting the Mirror’s Change the Law for Life campaign.
We are urging MPs to back a Private Members’ Bill in the Commons tomorrow to introduce an opt-out organ donor register. Jess says: “To those MPs who haven’t said they’ll be there on Friday, come and meet me and see how I live. Then you will change your mind.”
“It’s a full-time job just staying alive at the moment,” she adds at her studio flat as she shows Mr Ashworth the tube going into her stomach.
“I got diabetes when I was 12. Since then my health just deteriorated,” she adds. “It was getting salmonella in 2016 that finally made my kidneys pack in.
“Now my life is just dialysis, hospital appointments and being admitted to A&E when I am really ill.” Jess, on the transplant waiting list for five months, has opted for peritoneal dialysis which she can do herself at home. It involves sterile cleansing fluid being put in her stomach through a catheter.
She shows how dialysis works, saying waste and toxins are taken out via the fluid, which is washed in and out of her stomach in cycles. The waste is washed away in the catheter. “If I’m tired I could do [it] wrong and it would make me really unwell,” she says.
“There are so many things I have to think about and I am always thinking about it.
“The dialysis makes me breathless. Though I am grateful the dialysis has made me better than I would be without it.”
On one side of her flat is art equipment – she designed one of the cards for the Moonpig and NHS Blood and Transplant partnership to promote organ donation. On the other side is a huge pile of medical equipment. She says: “These are my two worlds. Art helps me cope.”
Mr Ashworth, the MP for Leicester South, asks Jess what it would mean if she gets a transplant.
She says: “I will be able to travel and work again.
“The things people take for granted I want to do so much... I am one of the lucky ones, only a year to 18-month wait. My life is in limbo until I get the call.” Jess, from Hendon, North London, adds: “I have to live near my parents in case I get ill and I need them to take me to hospital. It’s really hard for them as well.”
She says: “If I didn’t have the option for a transplant, my life would be over.
“I have a pretty miserable existence when I should be living my life.
“Since I was 12 I have missed out on a lot, so if I get the transplant I’ve got my teens and my 20s to make up for.”
Mr Ashworth is appealing for fellow politicians to support the bill tomorrow. He says: “There are 7,000 people waiting for an organ transplant across England. We’ve got to change the law. If we can get enough MPs to turn up on Friday we will save lives.”
It’s a pretty miserable existence. Just staying alive is a full-time job JESS HARRIS ON HER LIFE WAITING FOR TRANSPLANT