A Night Of High Drama

This is something I originally wrote in the 1980’s for national publication to help promote the Kidney Donor Card. Being a Milton Keynes project centred round a gentleman living on Emmerson Valley with a passion to help organ donor patients it appears in NOT THE CONCRETE COWS (1984) and was added to OUR REBEKAH A LOVE STORY FROM OUR NHS (2020) and NATIONAL HAPPY SMILE (2022). Here it is again in MILTON KEYNES THE CITY OF LEGEND. Organ donation and the attitude towards transplant surgery has changed across the decades but the story behind the next two thousand words has not.

So come with me and ride in the EMMERSON VALLEY MILTON KEYNES ambulance for a night of high drama.

If you look into your car mirror and see a silver Vauxhall Carlton, equipped with blue flashing lights, get out of the driver's way he will be on a vital mission of mercy.

Milton Keynes based, Valley Medical Transport grew originally from one man’s interest and desire to support transplant surgery. Now poised to become a fully registered charity, this organisation aims be on call twenty-four hours a day to both patients and doctors throughout the region.

When a donor organ is found the area transplant coordinator is faced with dozens of tasks, all of which have to come together with a degree of precision and within a strictly framed timetable. A team of surgeons has to be dispatched to harvest the organ from its donor, on many occasions several teams are needed depending on the number of organs suitable for transplant. (This can include the heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, pancreas and corneas.) The recipient has to be alerted and admitted to hospital, the transplant team called and made ready and, of course, the organs themselves transported, sometimes many hundreds of miles from donor to recipient hospitals.

Various options are available to transplant the organs, but none of them without associated significant costs. A commercial express courier service is likely to run into several hundreds of pounds, one hospital recently paid a staggering £3.50p a mile to move a pancreas from the North of England to the Home Counties ! An alternative could be the ambulance service but that would tie up a high tech vehicle together with highly trained crew who strictly speaking should be out saving lives. Again there is a charge and, in these days of interdepartmental billing, the recipient hospital will be fully invoiced for the costs involved.

Using a registered ambulance vehicle and advising police forces of its movements within their areas, Valley Medical Transport can provide a highly efficient and professional method of moving organs at a fraction of the commercial cost. Already on call to the Churchill Hospital in Oxford and the Royal Free Hospital in London the organisation is now looking to extend its services to many other centres.

Although Milton Keynes is not a transplant centre Valley Medical Transport offers help to the team of surgeons sent out to collect the donated organ. At the time such as this, when the surgeon is mentally preparing himself for the operation, explained a spokesman, it is hardly fair to expect him to have to drive a long distance to a strange hospital, negotiating traffic along the way, and then when he has the organ to have to drive it back. We will chauffeur him both ways, relieving much of the stress and leaving him only to have to do the job for which he has been most expertly trained. Once certain formalities have been concluded Valley Medical will be providing this service to surgeons within a group of London transplant centres and should be starting work next month.

The third arm of the service is designed to support the patient. When the prospective patient is placed on call for an organ their life is initially dominated by the telephone. Every time it rings their heart misses a beat in anticipation. But a patient can be on call for many months, years even, before a suitable organ is found so after a few weeks this tends to fade and take a background place and, while not forgotten, it certainly no longer governs every minute of their day. When the long-awaited call eventually does come the patient and their family are no longer fully prepared in quite the same way as they were on day one and consequently often thrown into chaos.

David Ashford whose ten year old daughter, Rebekah, has been through two transplants explained: On both occasions the first thing to do was to fill the car with petrol, of course we should have kept the tank topped up but just as it ran low we were called. Then came the problem of finding a working cash machine, not the easiest of tasks on earth. Once all the dashing about was over and the suitcase hastily packed we began to seventy-five mile drive to the hospital. With just about every emotion imaginable crashing through our minds I have to question just how fit I was mentally to sit behind the wheel.

Valley Medical Transport will put itself on call together with the patient, being ready night or day to handle all transport arrangements currently free of charge. Guys Hospital, which performs somewhere in the order of one hundred kidney transplants a year, has put the organisation on standby for its paediatric patients and will shortly be adding in many of its adult patients. Of these there is a young baby living in the West of Ireland, when his call comes Valley Medical will be waiting at Heathrow Airport to meet the plane.

There are currently nearly five thousand patients in Great Britain waiting for transplants, such operations of which cost many thousands of pounds carefully juggled within tightly controlled budgets. This newly formed charity aims to save hospitals anything up to 75% on the on their transport costs so freeing much needed finance for treatment.

Although Milton Keynes itself is nowhere to be found on the medical transplant map, Valley Medical Transport and its board of trustees aim to put the city firmly in the centre of what, they are hoping in time to come will become a nationwide service supporting patients and hospital doctors in this life giving field.

Any patient in Milton Keynes already on call for an organ transplant is invited to contact Valley Medical Transport to find out how the transport programme could possibly help them.

That was how my report appeared in the Milton Keynes Citizen in August 1993 . Valley Medical Transport went on to achieve full registration with the charity commissioners and is currently on call to most transplant centres in the region. The baby from Ireland did receive his transplant Valley Medical was there waiting at Heathrow for him. Let me tell you now about that story.

It was a filthy night. The wind was battering the side of our house and the rain hitting the ground so hard it was bouncing up again for several inches. I hate winter afternoons when it becomes prematurely dark, on this day it felt as if it had been dark since lunchtime. I had gone out in the car to meet my son’s school bus and saving the drenching walking home would have given him.

As I pulled up in front of our home my wife was standing there waiting to meet me. Valley Medical just phoned you, they want you to  go with the driver to Heathrow Airport. There's a baby being flown in from Ireland for a transplant in London.

A quick snatch for my camera, notebook and money before I too was standing in the driveway waiting for the car. I heard the sirens well before it pulled up, it's blue flashing lights illuminating the entire street. A night of high drama was about to unfold.

London Heathrow not the most accessible place on earth and hardly user friendly. On a stormy night with extensive roadworks on the M1 it was going to be difficult, It was the time when the extra lane was being added to the section between Luton and the A5 junctions with the contractors thinking it would be fun to close most of the access points onto the motorway.

The kidney is an organ that will tolerate being out of the body for quite some time but the shorter the period between donor and recipient the better.

The identity of the donor is kept strictly confidential so this particular organ could have come from anywhere in the country, indeed anywhere in Northern Europe. There is no way we could know the time scale involved but we did know that Valley Medical had been charged with getting the patient from the airport to the hospital as quickly as possible.

With the frustration of the motorway roadworks we decided to opt for the A5. My job was to sit in the passenger seat and work the siren, leaving the driver to concentrate fully on the road. I have to confess to a certain thrill and sense of power as I flicked the switch screaming the cars ahead of us after the way. It was a terrific responsibility, not only was it important we get through as quickly as possible but safety had to be preserved not only for ourselves but also for every other road user.

The charity’s office had faxed all police forces along our route to advise them of our movements. On the M25 officers in a police Range Rover waved and gave us thumbs up as we passed.

The weather was steadily worsening with gales battering the car. A severe weather warning was in force and we could not help thinking about our infant charge high over the Irish Sea. What kind of a flight was he having ?

At Terminal One the police were waiting for us and directed us to a reserve parking place right outside the Aer Lingus gate. It was the first time I have never had any difficulty parking at Heathrow !

Inside Aer Lingus staff were trying hard to cope with the worst night for flying all year. Many aircraft had been unable to take off from the smaller Irish airfields and our Dublin flight had been delayed. There was nothing we could do but wait.

The airline staff were brilliant. The patient was highlighted on the passenger computer and a special escort detailed to meet him and his mother once the plane was on the ground. Heathrow's police liaised with customs and immigration to ensure no delay but first the aircraft had to land.

I am afraid I may have made myself something of a nuisance as I pestered the Aer Lingus staff for updates on the aircraft's progress.

It's just 20 minutes away Sir. 

Is holding in the stack, shouldn't be too long now.

Then, just as we were about to suggest we ask air traffic control to run up a ladder and bring everybody down, came the news we wanted. They’re on final approach now.

The aircraft on the ground now. Shouldn't be much longer. Eventually young Jamie and his mum excitedly emerged. Into the car and we were off towards London on the M4.

It was two weeks before Christmas and the lights of Harrods shone more brightly than those of our car. We covered the distance from the airport to Guys Hospital in just half an hour delivering young Jamie in time for his transplant. Another successful mission for Milton Keynes based Valley Medical Transport.

The next week Valley Medical’s Vauxhall Carlton went underwent a transplant of its own. Although the car is always maintained in perfect order its engine was gaining in mileage and, with over 100,000 miles on the clock was not going to go on for ever.

First of all Vauxhall Motors in Luton offered a brand new engine free of charge then Milton Keynes Cowley and Wilson generously offered to fit it, performing a heart transplant on the car, entirely free of charge. It’s new engine beating beneath the bonnet, the car is back on the road performing its duties whenever the call goes out for help.

Valley Medical is no more. As medical services changed its role was not needed but for a short time its vital service, a MILTON KEYNES service, was important. In this account of international importance.