Outwardly Sally Slater has all the youthful ebullience of a carefree girl approaching her first teenage birthday. But that celebration on Friday has only been made possible by a remarkable stroke of luck. Beating inside her is what was once the heart of a 49-year-old woman.
The fading newspaper cuttings in the attic of the family home in the Yorkshire Dales village of Kirkby Mallam tell the story. Six years ago Sally was at death's door, struck down by a virus that weakens the muscles of the heart. She had had a mechanical pump fitted but doctors told her parents, Jon and Bridget, that only a transplant could save her.
The family launched an appeal and pictures of an unconscious Sally lying on a hospital bed, kept alive by a ventilator, hit the front pages. Ten days later their dream came true. Jon and Bridget got a call saying the doctors had found a suitable donor and the transplant surgery took place the next day at the Freeman hospital, Newcastle upon Tyne, in an operation lasting 10 hours.
Jon, a 42-year-old financial planner, said at the time: "The heart is from a lady in her 40s, from the north-east. Her family know and we have been in touch with them since. They will always be in our thoughts. It's a debt we can never repay." The family wrote to Sally and sent her a silver necklace as a present.
Sally's father recalled those tense few days in April 2000. "The surgeons basically told us that it could go right or wrong. If it didn't go right, this would be the end of the road. She was unconscious for about two days. It's all a bit of a blur now but I remember that when we eventually got in to see her and she started to come round, she was giggling. It must have been the effect of the morphine."
Although she has to take a daily cocktail of drugs, Sally is optimistic today about her future. She plays the piano and is involved in amateur dramatics. She wants to be a primary teacher. She said: "If it wasn't for this lady I wouldn't be alive now. But I know there's a lot of other people out there just like me. I have to go to hospital for tests every three months and I know I'll have to do that for ever but it doesn't bother me. I also know that, one day, I may have to have another operation but I feel fine about it. I'm not scared."
The trauma has had a profound impact on the family's attitude to life. "We have definitely got a live-for-now philosophy," her father said. "I now realise that it's a fairly slender thread that we all dangle from."
