STRANGERS SAVED MY SON'S LIFE TWICE!

Maggie Ayre, 60, couldn't be more grateful to the two donors who gave her son a second chance

- JENNY ACKLAND, LUCY LAING

Sitting in bed holding my tiny baby against my breast, I yawned. In the few weeks since Jack had been born in July 1997, he'd demanded food around the clock. You're a hungry little chap,' I smiled, placing him back into his cot. But as I clicked off my bedside lamp, I worried.

Jack was always so pale. And no matter how much milk he guzzled, his weight just kept going down. He'd been 7lb 130z at birth, but had lost several ounces since then and doctors shared my concerns. 

'You need to bottle feed him, I was told. I'd breastfed my daughter Louise, then four, with no problems, so my mother's instinct told me that something else was wrong. Still, back at home, I warmed up a bottle of formula for Jack, but nothing I did seemed to help him.

'Jack has chronic kidney failure,' a doctor eventually told me after tests. He had posterior urethral valves, which meant blockages had damaged his kidneys before birth.

'Is he going to die?" I asked, tears prickling in my eyes.

Doctors reassured me that he wasn't, but that he would need a kidney transplant eventually. He was only seven weeks old and was too small and weak to undergo the operation yet. But as his kidney function declined, so did  appetite. In January 1998, at NCT six months old, Jack was fitted with a feeding tube and had to WAS go on a dialysis machine at home, which did the job of his kidneys cleaning his blood.

The whirring and beeping kept me awake all night and I worried constantly about him. I still worked part-time as a district nurse, but was struggling to cope, especially with dividing my time between Jack and Louise, making sure she received my attention too.