'To get a heart and take Rory home would be incredible'

THE parents of a six-month-old baby girl who is on the urgent heart transplant waiting list have made a desperate plea for a donation.

- MATHILDE GRANDJEAN

Rory Fletcher has been in hospital since the day she was born as she suffers from dilated cardiomyopathy - a condition in which her heart's left ventricle is stretched and enlarged, and cannot pump blood properly.

Rory is in intensive care at the Freeman Hospital in Newcastle on a mechanical heart pump as her parents Becks and Toby wait for a donor's heart to become available for transplant.

This comes after the UK transplant waiting list reached record levels with 8,000 people still waiting for a lifesaving transplant, while the number of deceased organ donors dropped by 2% last year, figures published by NHS Blood and Transplant (NHSBT) have shown.

But Becks and Toby, from Knutsford in Cheshire, have not given up hope.

"We know Rory is one of the smallest children on the transplant waiting list, which means she is not 'competing' against others but on the other hand not many organs are donated from babies, so there are less hearts available in her size," said 31-year-old Becks.

"We would just be so grateful to the donor family if she had a transplant. It's a horrible situation for anyone that loses a child, and not one you ever want to think about.

"But I try to think of it that, if you can come away and turn something negative into something positive for another family, why wouldn't you? It would mean everything to us."

Becks, a public relations director, said she had "the smoothest of pregnancies" before giving birth by C-section, adding: "As soon as she was born it was clear something was wrong. We didn't know if we were expecting a girl or a boy, and by the time they'd announced she was a girl, she'd turned blue and was whisked away by the nurses.