'The gift of a normal life': transplant patient is record holder

At the age of 15, medics feared Katie Mitchell was coming to the end of her life after suffering irreversible lung damage and heart failure from a rare congenital disease.

- Jamie Grierson

But she defied the odds thanks to a heart and lung transplant, and at the age of 53 she has become the UK's longest-surviving recipient of such a procedure.

Mitchell was diagnosed with Eisenmenger syndrome when she was 11. She had high blood pressure in her pulmonary arteries which caused an increased resistance to blood flow through the lungs, which led to irreversible lung damage and heart failure.

Mitchell had her combined transplant at Royal Papworth hospital in September 1987, a procedure so rare that only about five are carried out in the UK each year. "Thanks to organ donation, I was given the gift of a normal life," she said.