In 2017, a nine-year-old girl from Devon was involved in a car crash that left her with a catastrophic brain injury. Keira had been a keen horse rider who loved animals, and would go out of her way to rescue insects in distress. After her family were told she was brain dead they immediately asked if she would be able to donate her organs, knowing it was what she would have wanted.
As Keira lay in intensive care, a young boy from Cheshire was on his eighth month in hospital with a dangerously enlarged heart. Before he became ill, nine-year-old Max loved to play football, climb trees and wrestle with his friends. But now, with acute cardiomyopathy brought on by a viral infection, Max was painfully thin and being kept alive with a mechanical heart pump. Not only did he not have the strength to leave his bed but, on his darkest days, he didn’t want to live. He and his family knew his heart could give out at any minute and his only hope was a transplant.
