AT the tender age of 21, Katherine Ireland lost her fight for life due to complications following a double lung transplant.

Katherine, of Cononley, suffered from the disease cystic fibrosis, which affected her lungs' ability to absorb oxygen into her blood and made even simple tasks, such as climbing stairs, difficult.

Not content to shy away from people for fear of being "different", Katherine embraced her disease and she and her family used it as a way of publicising the plight of others waiting on tenterhooks for that all important call which could save their lives.

The Ireland family never stopped in their self-appointed task of raising the profile of the donor card, even to a point of standing in the streets and handing them out to passers by.

Katherine agreed to add her voice to the Herald's campaign to encourage Craven people to put their names on a national donor register, and it's a tribute to her and others who let us into their lives that the campaign was so successful.

It couldn't have been easy watching the friends she made in hospital die waiting for a transplant. Indeed, on the day we interviewed her for our campaign she had just returned from the funeral of her best friend.

Last week we reported how doctors were delighted with her progress but alas it is only as a result of a cruel twist of fate that she never survived to live the normal life she longed for.

But her memory will live on, both in the work that Katherine and her family have done to highlight the plight of patients on the transplant list and through her own organs, which the Ireland family are hoping can be donated to someone else and possibly save their life.

They are sure that's what Katherine would have wanted as a last gesture to urge people to "carry the card".

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