WHEN Liz Phillips had a discussion with her husband about organ donation, little did she know that a few weeks later she'd be making the heartbreaking decision on whether she should donate his organs.
"There was a lady on the local news and her daughter needed a transplant," said Liz.
"Rick and I were sat watching and I said 'would you give your organs away?' and he said 'yeah, if they were any good to anybody'."
A couple of weeks later, Rick had a heart aneurysm on the football pitch and died a few days later. He was 38 years old.
"He was the old man of the football team but he was really fit and healthy and played every week," says Liz.
Expecting him to come home for Sunday dinner, Liz received a telephone call from the club manager to say Rick had been rushed to hospital.
Liz says: "He was conscious then. The ambulance man said he was conscious all the way to the hospital and he was talking about his family."
But Rick had a fit when he got to the hospital and never regained consciousness. He was kept alive in a coma and on the Tuesday, Liz and their four children prepared to say goodbye to him. At the time, the oldest, Dan, was 12, Robyn was 11, Chelci was nine, and the youngest, Jade, was seven.
It was a terrible time for the family from Retford but being able to donate Rick's organs meant some good came out of his premature death.
Liz says: "At the beginning it's a shock and as you go through the process, you wonder if you're doing the right thing. But when you start to get the feedback from the people who've received the organs, they put the pieces of the jigsaw back together."
Liz was introduced to her organ co-ordinator, Emma Thirwall, who helped her go through the process. It's through Emma that she keeps in contact with some of the recipients.
Liz says: "We've had letters off the heart recipient and the liver recipient. We know that his kidneys went to two different people and one was a child. We also know that they took pieces of bone. The organ co-ordinator told me that they sometimes graft bone on footballers and because Rick was a big footballer, we agreed to donate an amount of that as well."
She's still in contact with the person who received Rick's liver and it makes her happy to hear that he's gone from being in a coma to living a full and happy life.
"We got a letter not long ago to say he's competing in the Transplant Games. He's taken part in lots of events over the years and won medals, which he's always dedicated to Rick," says Liz.
In a cruel twist of fate, the family has experienced what it's like to be in need of a new organ. Her youngest daughter, Jade, 20, has been very sick since she was 12 years old.
She was diagnosed with auto-immune liver disease and then developed a secondary disease, primary sclerosing cholangitis (PSC), which attacks the bile ducts.
"Her immune system has turned on her organs. It attacked her liver first, then her bile ducts and her bowel and she had to have her bowel and gall bladder taken out," says Liz, who works as a checkout worker in Morrisons.
At the end of last year, Jade was assessed to see if she needed a liver transplant but a drug, Tacrolimus, is keeping her condition stable.
Liz says: "It's actually a drug which they normally give patients after a transplant. It suppresses the immune system from attacking the new liver but they've had to do that now to stop it attacking her own liver."
Knowing that Jade might need a new liver in the future has made the family more pleased than ever that they decided to donate Rick's organs.
Jade said: "It feels like he's done something good even after he died."
Their message to people is to sign the organ donor register and to discuss with their family what they want to happen when they die.
Jade said: "It's a difficult decision for families to make. If you have the conversation, it makes it easier and you'll feel like you've done the right thing by the person. You discuss getting married and you discuss having babies and mortgages, but nobody seems to discuss end of life."
