My daughter SAVED FIVE LIVES

After Christy Hurst lost her daughter, she found comfort in people she'd never met

- MISHAAL KHAN, LUCY LAING

I’ll always remember the day my husband Jerry and I brought our newborn daughter Jill home for the first time. It was March 2001 and it was a day we’d been dreaming about for years. We’d been married six years and despite longing to be parents, we struggled to conceive when I was diagnosed with endometriosis in July 2000, we accepted that it would never happen. 

It was devastating, but just one month later we discovered I was pregnant. When Jill was born she was our little miracle. That first day at home, wrapped up in a soft pink blanket, she just looked so tiny and delicate. I loved hearing her little cries and coos filling the house, and from that day on, our home just felt so full of love.

We adored watching our tiny newborn grow up into such a wonderful young lady. I’ll never forget when she was three, she came home from nursery and asked me if she could take a toy in the next day for another child. ‘They don’t have any toys so I want them to have one of mine,’ she’d said.

Her kindness only grew as she got older. Aged four she told her friends that she didn’t want any gifts for her birthday and instead asked them to make donations to the local hospital.

It was no surprise that Jill was hugely popular and had an abundance of friends. And when she was 16 she made Jerry and me so proud when she announced that she had signed up to be an organ donor. ‘If anything happens to me, I want to know that I can help people,’ she’d said, so sure of herself. Of course, I agreed, never dreaming that anything would ever happen to our daughter.

Making plans