After the operation I was consumed with thoughts of my 'friend' who now had my blood inside her. No, friend is wrong. She became like a sister, closer even than that. I talked to her out loud, willing her to recover. I felt my strength had left me and gone directly to her, that her need was so much greater than mine at that time. She just had to pull through. I wrote letters to her while I travelled to London on the train. I knew I could not send them, but I had to get this obsession out of me and into her. I felt the food I had eaten and the wine I had drunk would revive her and uphold her and give her the energy that I had myself.

Three weeks later, fully recovered and back at work, received as a hero by anyone the slightest bit squeamish, I received a hurried call from the Trust. My recipient had died. The family thanked me.

The world became a blur, my colleagues' enquiring faces spinning before my eyes. I could tell no-one. I walked dazed to St James' Park and sat on a bench and cried until I found the energy to go home. And I was angry. That she should die after all my hopes for her, after all I had been through. It was a bereavement that affected me more than I can say. Someone whom I knew nothing about except her name and nationality, whom I had never met and may never have met, the two of us thrown together by a fluke of genetic material. I mourned for weeks, imagining the devastation of her family as their hopes were dashed.

It probably sounds as if, as an unsuccessful donor I resent the sacrifice I made. I don't think so. I am not overly sentimental. I am a nurse, I understand the theory and practice of blood and marrow donation and the necessity for it. As a parent I dread the fatality of myself or my child. Maybe we are stacking up points for our own redemption.

I wonder if successful recipients have a similar emotional bond with their donors, and how organ donors and recipients feel years later when their emotions have subsided. I wonder if Annette's family ever think of me.