“Every day when I wake up, my daily mantra is to thank my donor and his family. I am so, so grateful to be alive, but I never forget that my chance to live has come from someone else’s tragedy.”
Angela Wilson simply shouldn’t be here. We are sitting in her cottage in Nairn; there’s a view of the sea from her bedroom window, and it’s to the beach that she walks every day with her dog Hugo.
Eight years ago, Angela began to feel breathless. She was more tired than usual but put her fatigue down to a number of things; she’d just celebrated her 50th birthday, and had been working hard as a beautician in the run up to Christmas and New Year, when she had enjoyed a busy time with family and friends.
One evening, as her elder son was going out to football, she feared she might be having a heart attack. Jamie called an ambulance, and Angela was rushed to Raigmore where, after tests, it transpired she was in heart failure. Within 48 hours she was on her way to the Golden Jubilee Hospital in Glasgow.
The hope was that her heart failure could be treated with medication, but that turned out not to be the case. Angela only realised she had been transferred to the heart transplant ward after her sister came to visit.
“I was freaking out,” she says, thinking back at the memory. “It was surreal. I couldn’t get my head around the fact that I was that ill, or that I was now waiting for someone to die so that I could have the chance to live.
“Three weeks earlier I’d been having lunch in Café 1 in Inverness with friends, now I was lying on my back in hospital with my heart operating at just 4% capacity, effectively dying, but being kept alive by a machine. I kept saying to myself, “I’m a Mum, I can do this.” But it really messed with my head.”
Angela didn’t realise it at the time, but her heart failure was so severe that she was immediately put to the top of the Transplant List. But given how quickly events had happened, she didn’t have time to think about what was happening to her.
“The only thing I really knew about organ donation was that I’d signed that section of my driver’s license when I passed my test at 17,” she says. “To be needing a new heart, or I would die, was something I just didn’t have time to get my head around.”
In March 2017, just six weeks after being admitted to Raigmore, Angela received a donor heart.
She takes up the story; “Waking up with a new heart was both amazing and strange. I had to learn to walk again and will be immune suppressed for the rest of my life, but apart from regular check-ups at The Golden Jubilee, to get scans and my meds checked, I am good to go.”
Angela’s health will never be as good as it was before surgery, but she is eternally grateful for her second chance at life.
“All I know about my donor is that he was 30 years old and suffered a brain haemorrhage”, she says. I wrote to his family, but I have yet to receive a response. But every day he is with me, and on every family occasion too – birthdays, at Christmas, and on the anniversaries of my operation. I am also aware that as I am celebrating the anniversary of my new heart, another family will never forget that date either. It is bittersweet.”
The extra eight years of life have allowed Angela to watch her family grow up, graduate, excel in their chosen fields, and meet and settle with partners. It has given her time to make new friendships, and to meet a new partner herself.
If it’s possible for her to step back and look at the bigger picture, how would she describe the Organ Transplant programme?
Angela thinks it is quite straightforward. “It’s about giving someone else life when you can’t live any more. My donor died, and that’s an absolute tragedy for the people who loved him, but his death isn’t something anyone could have prevented. For me to have been given life out of another family’s tragedy is the most precious gift”.