Synopsis

Four years ago, Diana Sanders could not walk to the end of her short garden. She faced a choice - die young, or go through life-threatening surgery for an uncertain recovery and a future full of medication. Born with a condition that meant that her heart never pumped enough oxygen around her body, Diana chose to live.

Will I still be me? A journey through a transplant is Diana's book about her bid for survival. She traces the process of a heart-lung transplant with humour and honesty - the agonising wait for a suitable donor, the midnight rush to Papworth Hospital, surviving the nine hour operation and the intricate route to recovery.

The book charts the despair that can follow a major operation, as well as the kind of thinking and help from others that can fuel the will to live. The medication alone is daunting; side effects at times feel worse than the original condition, and living with new organs brings different challenges. "I have this huge part of someone else inside me," she writes, "and for a long time I didn't feel I was me anymore".

"One thing I really wanted, when faced with a transplant, was an account of what it is like to go there," she says. "What I hope I've done is to provide a companion for people going through this process, which will also help carers and the medical profession to understand what it is like."

As well as being a real human-interest story, the book argues strongly for organ donation. Like Diana, many people's lives are saved, or vastly improved, by transplants. However, these are the lucky few. In the UK each year more than 7,000 people wait for a transplant, of whom only 2,500 are successful. The book describes the issues of organ donation, aiming to dispel some of the myths and encourage more people to register as donors.

Today, Diana is back at work as a psychologist in the NHS, and able to walk for miles, travel and live a normal life. "Even being able to walk down the road to post a letter is a miracle".