Cramlington Teen’s Heart Transplant: One Year On.
A Cramlington teenager is urging people to sign the organ register - almost a year on from her own heart transplant.
15 year old Chloe Beaney was given just days to live before she was saved by a donor last year.
Now she's urging others to start the conversation.
New figures show 84 people in Northumberland, Tyne and Wear have died on the waiting list in the last 5 years (April 2011 and November 2015).
Meanwhile over 120 are currently waiting for a transplant in the region.
Chloe told Metro Radio that she’ll always be thankful to the donor that saved her life:
“It is sad knowing that they have passed away and that their family has lost a family member, but I’m really grateful that I’ve been given another chance to do things that I couldn’t before.”
“It’s only been the past few months that I’ve started to get better, no I’m feeling absolutely fine, which I haven’t felt in ages.”
Chloe’s mum, Catriona, says they’re very lucky her daughter didn’t lose her fight. She said:
“That thought is just not worth thinking about, she’s fought for her life more than once and we’ve got everything to be thankful for to this family.”
“This time last year she was really really sick and we hadn’t known for very long at all that she needed a transplant. It happened fast so we didn’t really register it all.
It’s been a tough year; I’m not going to dismiss that. But she’s doing so well now, in comparison to last year she’s a different person altogether.”
The numbers waiting in our region show only a small part of the UK picture. Of the almost 7,000 patients currently on the UK’s transplant waiting list, 30% have been waiting more than two years. More than 500 of them have been waiting longer than five years, over 1,800 days each.
Almost 49,000 people in the UK have endured the wait for an organ transplant in the last 10 years and over 6,000, including 270 children, have died before receiving the transplant they desperately needed.
The figures released today by NHS Blood and Transplant coincide with the launch of a new organ donation campaign ‘The Wait’ to highlight the true scale of the donor organ shortage.
Find out more at: http://www.nhsbt.nhs.uk/