Counting The Beats: A Heart Transplant Journey
Coming in March 2027
In 2019, I received a heart transplant.
But this isn’t just the story of an operation.
Counting the Beats is about what happened before, during and after it: the years of living with a failing heart, the strange reality of waiting in hospital for a donor, the fear and uncertainty of transplantation, and the long journey towards making an ordinary life feel ordinary again.
It is also about the things that don’t necessarily appear in the medical notes.
The boredom. The friendships. The indignities. The emotion of waiting.
The people who cared for me when I could no longer care for myself. The laughter that turns up in places where you least expect it.
And, running through everything, the knowledge that my second chance at life could only come because another person lost theirs.
Counting the Beats is that story as I experienced it — with honesty, humour and fragility and with enormous gratitude to my donor and their family, and to the medical teams who cared for me.
It isn’t a story about being brave.
It’s a story about being alive.