A CUMBRIAN kidney patient has become a ‘champion’ for the campaign to make Kendal the UK’s first ‘donor town’.

Fiona Marsden received a new kidney at the age of 16, and said she decided to become involved in the scheme after seeing a Facebook post by Kendal town councillor Rachael Hogg.

Cllr Hogg, along with husband and Kendal Mayor Cllr Chris Hogg, are aiming to get as many people in the area to sign up as organ donors over this year.

“As a teenage kidney transplant recipient one of my aims has always been to promote organ donation, to ensure others are also lucky enough to receive the same beautiful, life changing gift," said Fiona, of Carlisle.

“As a healthy 16-year-old school girl, organ failure had never been on my list of worries. I had signed up to the donor register just after my 16th birthday - something I would go on to find incredibly comforting - but never really dwelled on it – naively assuming it would never affect me, much less become an all-encompassing nightmare for the next 18 months.

“I spent those months with my life on hold, too unwell for school or work. Watching Christmas and birthdays go past from different hospital beds. When that call came, almost two years ago now, I was a sister, daughter, friend, auntie and student with hardly the energy to get out of bed each morning, more comfortable in hospitals than at home.

“Today I sit in my sister’s house, healthy and happy and full of energy. I can play with my nephew, now a happy toddler, for hours on end, and have started university with the hopes of becoming a children’s nurse.

“With more people on the register, willing to save lives, all that can happen is other success stories – other fathers and sisters and friends and children given the chance to have ‘normal’ lives with their families.”

You can sign up on the NHS Organ Donor Register at https://www.organdonation.nhs.uk/how_to_become_a_donor/registration/registration_form.asp.