Organ Donation: Why I Would Give You My Heart

Marking the powerful Radio 4 documentary, The Boy Who Gave His Heart Away, the award-winning journalist, Cole Moreton shares how his views on organ donation have changed since making the documentary series.

For a long time I was squeamish about the idea of my heart, lungs, liver, kidneys and corneas being taken from my body after death. There’s still something about it that just seems wrong. Frightening. Maybe it’s some kind of echo down the ages of the medieval belief that the body will be resurrected, if it’s still intact. Maybe it’s just fear of death.The thought of being cold on a slab with the scalpel going in and my innards coming out still makes me queasy. But let’s get real: when the time comes I will know nothing about it. (Hopefully. There was an episode of Doctor Who that really made me wonder … ) And my feelings about organ donation were competely turned upside down by hearing about Marc McCay and Martin Burton, two boys who suddenly fell seriously ill at the age of 15 and 16. You can hear their amazing story in my new series for Radio 4, The Boy Who Gave His Heart Away. It happened in the summer of 2003 but the ripples from that moment go on.

One boy was struck down by a brain haemorrhage. The other caught a virus that attacked his heart. They were close to death in England and in Scotland, a couple of hundred miles apart. They didn’t know each other, but their lives would be intimately bound together. One of the boys died. His organs were taken to help other people.

Written by journalist, Cole Moreton, presenter of The Boy Who Gave His Heart Away

I would give you my heart. Completely, if you wanted it. There was a time when I would have said no, but I have totally changed my mind.

The doctors asked for permission to do that immediately after telling his mother that he was brain dead, which seems brutal. She was gracious though, and understood. “He was young, there was no part of his body damaged in any way other than his brain. Even then, I could see it would have been sacrilege to have lost all of those healthy young organs and bury them with him. I don’t know whether I would have felt like that two or three hours later. I might have been so grief stricken that I didn’t want anyone to touch him.”

I went out and got a donor card the next day
Cole Moreton

It’s very rare for the men and women, boys and girls who have transplants to meet the families of donors but in this case - through a remarkable series of coincidences and some detective work - it was possible to trace the organs and what happened to the people who got them.

So I met the man who got the teenager’s liver and was saved from a condition they call Vampire’s Disease, which causes his skin to blister in the sunlight. He was able to survive and see his kids grow up because of the transplant. I also met the promising young footballer whose life was saved by the other boy’s heart, after it was rushed by road and air through the night in a desperate race against time. And I watched a mother still grieving for her son reach out and touch a young man’s chest, putting her palm flat against him to feel the pulse. That was the heart of her son, beating away inside the boy whose life he saved, 13 years later. There were tears.

But it wasn’t what changed my mind, to be honest. That was something that the father of one of the boys said. He was on an exercise with the RAF in the Nevada desert when his son fell ill and he set off on an agonising 19-hour journey home, suddenly realising half way what was at stake. “They wanted me back to authorise them to turn the life support machine off, because he wasn’t going to make it. I left the phone booth, sat in the departure lounge, put the coat over my head sobbed. I knew I had lost my son.” By the time he reached the hospital, that father knew that he would say yes to organ donation. “I wanted to make somebody’s life better. I knew my life was not going to be better.” I was asking him about that when he turned the tables and put a question to me that really hit home: “If your son needed a heart, wouldn’t you want him to have one?” The only possible answer was yes. Please God. Anything. So he asked me: “Then why would you deny that chance to another father and another dying son?”

I went out and got a donor card the next day. After listening to this incredible story, I hope you will too.