Earlier this year Joe Ball and his family made a 500-mile round trip from Devon to Winsford, Cheshire, to visit a boy called Max Johnson. Mr Ball, 35, wept as he embraced the 10-year-old and then he took a stethoscope and put it to the youngster’s chest so he could listen to the beating of his late daughter’s heart.
His little girl, Keira, had suffered a severe head wound in a car crash the previous summer and died after three days in hospital.
Mr Ball consented to the donation of her organs and they saved four lives in total, among them that of Max who was at risk of “imminent death”, having waited 196 days for a new heart.
