Tim Lezard with his wife Ruth, and daughter Charlie. Picture: Paul Nicholls, courtesy of Gloucester Citizen

The Gloucester Citizen is urging readers to become blood donors so that the county’s blood banks can be kept topped up for emergencies. As part of the paper’s Time For A Pint campaign, reporter Tim Lezard told his own remarkable story. Without blood donors, Stroud-based Tim would be dead, and a heart-warming romance – and the birth of baby Charlie – would neverhave happened.

The surgeon stitched me up and waited for me to die. The operation had already lasted 16-and-a-half hours and there was nothing more he could do.

Having successfully cut out my diseased aortic valve, he was unable to stop my swollen and bruised heart from bleeding.

He and his team tried valiantly for several hours to stem the tide, but swab after swab became drenched in blood.

Finally, they gave up. The surgeon packed even more swabs tightly around my heart and, not bothering even to wire my ribs together, sewed my skin up.

He told his staff to return in the morning and, if I was still alive, to complete the job properly.

Much to everyone’s surprise, I made it through the night.But I wouldn’t have had a chance if it hadn’t been for the anonymous men and women who selflessly gave their blood to keep me alive.

I don’t know how much blood I lost during my operation – or how much I was given.But as soon as it went into my body, most of it came straight back out again, so it’s fair to say I’m overdrawn at the blood bank.

Normally, heart surgery patients do not require blood transfusions except in emergencies, but mine was a special case.

I was diagnosed with a congenital heart defect when I was three-years-old. The tips of my fingers went blue and nobody knew why – until my parents took me to a heart specialist in London.She suspected I had a faulty aortic valve, but wanted to make sure, so I went into Hammersmith Hospital for an exploratory operation over Christmas 1977.

All I remember from that time was falling in love with a pretty blonde nurse (I can’t remember her name – love is fickle when you’re seven!), being visited by QPR footballers, kicking up a bit of a fuss when I had my stitches out and being subjected to countless Elvis films on the television – he died when I was in hospital and I’ve hated his music ever since.

The operation proved the specialist right – I had a leaking aortic valve, which meant some of the blood destined for my body was seeping back into my heart, leaving me short of breath and energy.Because of the risks involved, doctors chose not to operate until they had to – which turned out to be in 1993, when I caught an infection.

During the course of an eight-hour operation, the surgeon replaced the valve with a metallic one – giving me a new lease of life.

Again, the most memorable part of this two-month hospital stay (apart from the England cricket team losing the Ashes again) was falling in love with a nurse – a pretty brunette called Ruth.

This time, though, I was old enough to make a proper go of it and, having plucked up the courage to ask her out when I was allowed home, ended up marrying her three years later!But before then we went through another, even more traumatic, operation when the heart infection returned.

My new valve and part of my aorta had become infected and needed replacing. It was during this operation I needed pint after pint of blood to keep me alive. Without the kindness of the mystery donors I would never have lived to marry Ruth and never lived to have fathered a beautiful baby daughter, who is now five-months-old.

Maybe you were one of the donors – neither you nor I will never know for sure – but if you were, I thank you for giving me life, the most precious gift of all.

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