HOW AGREEING

When the doctors asked us about donating my mum’s organs, all I could feel was fury. I was aged 13, and hours earlier we’d been told my mum, Heulwen, had suffered a brain aneurysm and was only being kept alive by a life support machine. It was the most painful moment of my life.

The doctors were trying to be patient and thoughtful, but there was an urgency to their request they couldn’t mask.

I remember one saying: “We know what a difficult time this is for you. We’re sorry, but we need to discuss whether you’ll agree to donate Heulwen’s organs.”

I didn’t completely understand, possibly because of my age, but I did know it felt like they were physically ripping my heart out.

I lashed out, horrified they were even asking us the question so soon, at such a sensitive time but now I know they were just doing their job.

Much of the rest of the conversation is a blur, but as a family my grandad Gordon, now 88, dad Simon, 60, uncle Hywel, 56, my sisters Hanna, 31, Beth, 28, and I decided, yes, we should donate.

My 51-year-old mum was not on the organ donor register, but she’d told my uncle six months earlier she would like to be a donor if the time ever came. I’m sure she didn’t think it would come so very soon.

Now it was time to say goodbye.

I gave her a final hug, and remember she was so warm, while at the same time I knew she wasn’t really there any more. Then we left the hospital and, as soon as I got home, I got changed and binned the clothes I’d been wearing for the last 24 hours.

Life slowly limped on but I didn’t think about organ donation again, instead choosing to block out the memory of that terrible day in January 2006. RHIAN ON PROUD LEGACY OF HER MOTHER

But when the Mirror launched the Change the Law for Life campaign in 2015, calling for everyone to be a potential organ donor unless they opted out, I began to wonder about the people who might have benefited from my mum’s donation.

Were the operations even successful or was it all a waste of time? Was it just one person? Did they have children? Was it a child who was helped?

I wrote to the NHS donor family care service. I wasn’t particularly optimistic that I’d be able to find anything out, yet within three days they sent letters from 2006 addressed to my dad and to me that I’d never seen before – because at the time I just didn’t want to know.

It took a week to prepare myself to read the letters and it was on a train to Wales – aptly, because that’s where mum was from – I decided to open them.

Incredibly the letters told me she saved six people’s lives. Thanks to her four other mums and a man in his 50s had been given life-saving transplants.

Her liver was given to a 38-year-old mum of three and a kidney was given to a 33-year-old single mum with a young daughter. Before the op, this mum had been on dialysis for years and could now spend more time with her little girl.

My mum’s second kidney was donated to a 40-year-old woman who lives with her son, daughter and mother. She too was confined to a life of dialysis before the t given wou alon

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I wondered who might have benefited from mum’s donation