I’ve never really enjoyed the festive season since that Christmas Eve when my husband Jimmy was told that he was on the list to receive a heart transplant.

“He had been in the Northern General hospital for a few days for what he thought was a recurring respiratory complaint. They found that he had an enlarged heart, and after medical tests to confirm that he was otherwise healthy told him that his only chance of a good quality of life in the future was to have the transplant operation.

“The transplant patients’ PR machine went into full spin. People who had received new organs and gone on to run marathons or other great achievements were promoted and ex-patients came to talk to him about how good life was for them. Staff were busy telling him how quickly he might recover from the operation and be back to a normal life. Everything was optimistic and upbeat – we’d not been married for quite a year and we were hopeful for a happy future.

“Jimmy came home after Christmas. We had a bag packed ready to rush back to the hospital and a bleeper which could go off any time to tell him that there might be an organ suitable for him.

His dark sense of humour never left him and every time he heard the sirens of an emergency vehicle going past he wondered if this might be his opportunity to get his spare part. I was torn between being desperate for him to have his operation and the horror of knowing that an otherwise healthy person would need to die for it to happen.

“He seemed to improve and said he felt well. We took our dog for a country walk one day and he wondered if there’d been a mistake and he didn’t need this operation – I told him to speak to the doctors on his next hospital appointment later that week.

“Two days later I came home from work and found him face down on our living room floor.

“He’d had a massive heart attack and I was told later that he was probably dead before he hit the ground. It was January 25, Burns night, a celebration that my Scottish husband always loved. “I had never even considered that Jimmy wouldn’t live long enough to have the operation. I had thought about what might happen if the transplant wasn’t as successful as it could have been but not that he would die before he got his chance of a new life. Later, I was told that about a quarter of people die whilst waiting, but of course this is isn’t the kind of news that patients want to hear so it wasn’t really discussed in the hospital. “The day after his death I was shocked to be called by the hospital and asked if I would consent to tissue from Jimmy being used to transplant into other people. That was a dreadful thing to be asked – I had to agree of course, but I did feel as if he had been let down by the transplant system which now wanted to use him as a resource. It was the right decision of course, but very painful at the time.

“If more people could make that awful decision then lives could be saved or debilitating illnesses relieved – but it needs people to be incredibly brave at the most terrible moment in their lives.

“The alternative is healthy organs going into the crematorium and perhaps somebody else dying on the waiting list.

“It’s brought it all back writing this – but if it raises awareness then it will be worthwhile.”