Transplant that made Dad fighting fit again
IT IS two years since my dad, Don, received a heart transplant.
A few weeks back – for the first time since his op – we were at the football together, watching our beloved Queens Park Rangers.
The last time we’d done that, when his illness meant he couldn’t even manage stairs, we’d had to get a taxi to drop us at the entrance and then sat in the hospitality area. Now he can jump for joy every time our team scores (four times that afternoon, as it happens).
Dad’s health problems were due to amyloidosis, a rare condition caused by a build-up of the abnormal protein amyloid in the heart muscle, causing it to stiffen and, ultimately, fail.
He’d been healthy all his life – never smoked and only drank occasionally – but in 2014 he began to feel unwell. Eventually his illness would leave him gasping for breath after just a short walk. Prior to his transplant, he’d been kept in hospital on the urgent waiting list for five months. We still consider it a miracle he got one in time.
At a check-up recently he asked after a patient he’d met on the ward who’d also been waiting for a heart. The man had had a transplant, but didn’t survive.
It’s desperately sad to think of the 300 people who die every year waiting for donor organs. Life hangs in the balance when you are in need of a transplant, which is why new research aimed at improving prospects for patients is so vital.
It’s also so, so important that every single person is on the organ donor register. What better thing could you do at the end of your own life than save the life of another?
It meant Dad was there to celebrate my 40th birthday last year and regularly watches his granddaughter Olivia, ten, play netball. He spends hours playing with his other little granddaughters, Alba and Ottie, who are four, and takes his grandson Will, 14, for pizza and cinema afternoons.
As a family, we often reflect upon the remarkable gift we were so lucky to receive. I only hope more people get that chance.