Helen Eccles
Dear Family
After a long silence – its been ten years since my last letter – it’s a relief to be writing again and sharing some good news with you, as well as feeling able to reiterate my deepest heartfelt thanks to you all for the amazing gift of life that your grandmother/mother gave me, my friends and my family, by donating her liver to save my life.
I have so much to be grateful for and to celebrate that is marvellous and I am pleased to say that one of the legacies of being a transplant patient is that I really appreciate the small things in life, as much as the more sublime. Being fit and healthy and being able to spend time with family and friends is so important to me, as is doing the most ordinary things with them. My daughter Ella is now a beautiful teenager and every year on her birthday I am reminded how blessed we are because that is the time of my transplant. I have lots of photographs of her and I thought I would share a handful of them with you to convey just how grateful we are that she’s had her Mum and her Dad to lean on over the last 14 years.
Talking to people who have experienced amazing recoveries or near misses, I am struck by how similar their responses are. There seems to be a common theme running through their stories. This ability to delight in the mundane and to live in the “Now” becomes more and more central and with it comes a deep appreciation for the simplest pleasures in life, like walking the dog, watching our children smile and tease us, sharing a spontaneous picnic in an unlikely place or chatting to a stranger with a sense of humour.
My husband William lost his first wife through breast cancer and so we feel doubly blessed to have found each other and to have built a new life together. We have been married for six years and Im delighted to say that our marriage just gets better and better.
There are five doctors in my family and I have always wanted to be one too. For ages I wondered how I could ever repay the hospital, the doctors and the nurses for all they did for me. Together we won several big battles against the most extraordinary odds in Intensive Care.
Recently I’ve realised that the answer lay in finding out what I was really good at and seem born to do. I searched and searched and of course the answer was right here in front of me all along. I like helping others find their true calling and work out what it is that gives them meaning in their lives and a deep connection with their intuitive wisdom. I have set myself up as a 'coach' and I find it deeply rewarding work. John D Russell said, 'I never cease to be amazed at the power of the coaching process to draw out the skills or talent that was previously hidden within an individual, and which invariably finds a way to solve a problem previously thought unsolvable.' I think thats what we all did in the Royal Free after Ella was born and why each of us succeeded so brilliantly. We coached each other through the bleak and difficult bits and also dropped the doctor patient divide and replaced it with something much more powerful and profoundly human. Thank you again for making that miracle possible.
Best wishes, Helen
The picture I painted is an abstract version of Duccios scenes in the Maesta, which hangs in the National Gallery. I love the colours of his Annunciation, when the angel swoops down to bless Mary with a child. I therefore spent time sketching the colours from the original before producing my own transcription.
