Playing catch up

First off here's the article about my special gift to the hospice (here).© Manchester Evening News

Christmas Eve

I've always believed Christmas is as good as you make it as with other special events, days, making the best of what you have makes the day what it is. This year I didn't expect Christmas to be an easy going day and it wasn't but we still made it a special one and enjoyed it. Of course Santa was very good to me and spoiled me.
Not too long after that article had gone out in the local paper I got a call from the Manchester evening news. They said NHSBT had contacted them over the 'help save my life' article and Channel M interveiw to say that as a result 3000 people in Manchester signed up to the organ donor register. As I was told this over the phone my eyes filled up. At the time when it came out I thought, it's quite good maybe 1 or 2 people might sign up and even if its just 1 or 2 that’s enough for me, that's my job done. But to hear that 3000 signed up took me by surprise, the thought popped in my head '3000 people? And 1 person can save upto 7 lives?! That's alot of lives saved!' The journo asked for a few comments and said they would run another article over Christmas to report the response. And sure enough on Dec 29th I was again on the frontpage here. That cheered me up alot but to hear that Jessica Wales received her lungs after over 4yrs of waiting cheered me up more. A couple of days before my article came out I saw on facebook that Jess had taken a turn for the worse, in no uncertain terms when your ill enough to be on the transplant list that often spells out that time is up. Knowing this I texted a couple of friends trying to find out exactly what was going on and received details that that was in fact the case. Jess was clearly out of time and I thought it was more than likely within the next day or so I'd probably get a message saying time was up and Jess had passed away. But a few hrs after hearing Jess was critical rumours started to fly around facebook that she had had a call and it was a go. Just after midnight on Dec 28th it was confirmed Jess was in fact in theatre getting new lungs. The feeling of relief was over whelming. Of course not forgetting the donor family, they have lost a loved one over the Christmas period and during that time have been selfless enough to think of others and agree to organ donation and because of this Jess' life and probably the lives of a few others have been saved. Jess was so poorly going into transplant so there's no doubt her recovery will be lengthy and probably a little complicated, it's early days but Jess has been given her 2nd chance, at last. Jess' friends handled how ill she was and documented details about her transplant so well that it spurred me on to do my final part of planning which I'd been meaning to do for a while. My group on facebook, Rachael Wakefield's Transplant Plea has a following of over 8000 people now and is not really used anymore so I've made a couple of close friends admins and they're going to update the group for me when I can't because I'm hopefully getting new lungs. The group, twitter and my blog will be updated by friends and will be the most upto date forms of news. I will (situation permitting) update right until I go to theatre then my phone will be switched off until I'm able to use it. Mum will contact 3 close friends with updates and they will keep on top of facebook, twitter and blog. Now those final plans are laid hopefully it won't be too long before they are put into practice.
New Year's Eve was manic so more on that later.