Just breathe

HEATHER Marie Beacham picked up the phone two years ago and heard the words she hoped and feared most in this world: “We’ve got some lungs for you.”  

The Dundalk teenager, whose lungs were scarred from cystic fibrosis, was so unnerved that she accidentally hung up the phone and began to shake. Her mother wrapped her arms around her 15-year-old daughter’s tiny frame, holding Heather and crying, “Oh, my God, you’re going to do it.” But hours later, at Johns Hopkins Children’s Centre in Baltimore, Heather was told what almost every transplant patient is told at some point: the donated organ wasn’t suitable.