'We were so long waiting I wasn't even thinking of a transplant that morning when the surgeon rang," says Bernie Naughton. "She said they had a suitable match for Jake and to get up as fast as we could."
That was last September. A three-year wait for a suitable kidney donor for her son Jake, now five years old, had finally come to an end. The transplant ended an ordeal for his mother which began when he was one and a half years old. "I noticed he was not well, that he had gone off his food. His GP took a urine sample and sent us to Wexford Hospital straight away.
"He spent three weeks there and then went up to Crumlin and it was five months before we got home. His whole immune system had dropped and he was picking up everything. I stayed there with him. I never went home."
After he came home he needed frequent trips back to Crumlin from Wexford. And no sooner would they have made the two -and-a-half-hour trip from Our Lady's Hospital for Sick Children than they might have to turn around and go back again because Jake had developed a high temperature, high blood pressure or dehydration on the way home.
"I did the dialysis at home, 12 hours a night," she says. "I had a machine here at home."
Mother and child could sleep throughout the dialysis unless an alarm sounded on the machine. And that could mean getting up and going to Crumlin at one or two in the morning.
"They removed his kidneys in 2001," she says. "When he was brought to theatre, his potassium just froze up and he had two heart attacks. It was a long wait," she says of the three years it took to get a suitable donor. "He wasn't eating and he had to be tube fed the whole time."
The transplant, last October, has made an enormous difference. "He is starting to eat and exploring more foods. He is starting to feel hungry.
"He will be on medication for the rest of his life but he has a reasonably normal life now. He is starting school in September. He has completely changed now. He is never sick."
But their return to Our Lady's for tests every three weeks reminds her how lucky Jake is to have had his transplant. "You see the same faces when you go up," she says. "There's a lot of children waiting up there for organs."
The Minister for Health, Mr Martin, will launch Organ Donor Awareness Week 2004 (it runs from April 3rd to 10th) later today at Dublin's Mansion House. Tomorrow Senators and TDs will demonstrate their solidarity and support for organ donation when they sign a "Declaration of Support for Organ Transplantation".