A HEARTBROKEN mum, who lost her daughter to diabetes while she was waiting for organs to be donated, will meet MPs next week in a bid to encourage more people to sign up as donors.
Patricia Carroll’s daughter, Natalie, died in hospital, aged 38, on New Year’s Day, after a rapid deterioration in her health.
She had been diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes 30 years earlier.
The condition had already robbed her of her eyesight, and in 2009, she suffered kidney failure and became dependent on dialysis.
She was offered a donated pancreas and a kidney from her mum in 2010, but she was too ill to undergo the ninehour transplant procedure, meaning she had to wait until she was well enough and a new donor could be found.
However, on Christmas Day last year, she collapsed and stopped breathing and her life-support machine was switched off a week later.
According to her wishes, her organs were donated.
Patricia, 61, of Perry Way, Aveley, will travel to Parliament with Thurrock MP Jackie Doyle-Price next Wednesday to lobby MPs about organ donation, as well as highlighting a pilot scheme in Wales in which it will be assumed people wish to be donors, unless they opt out.
She said: “I want to encourage more people to join the donor register.
“For several years, I watched my daughter suffer – she was dying, slowly, before my eyes, but some good has come of all this suffering.
One of the heart valves Natalie donated was transplanted into a one-year-old girl, who was born with congenital heart problems, meaning she has received, from Natalie, the best gift of all – the gift of life.”
It is Transplant Week next week and more details can be found online at www.transplantweek.co.uk
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