I hope many of you may take action in the wake of our story this week about the life or death situation teenager Katherine Ireland is in.

I appreciate it is a sad story. But I make no apologies for running stories of this type when necessary, as I recently explained.

By giving up a few inches of space in the paper we might be able to help save the lives of numerous people like courageous Katherine.

I also accept that quite a lot of people will choose not to take action and carry a card. They cannot be criticised for that. It is a matter of deep personal choice.

For the record I have been on the NHS donor register for some time. I made my decision based on the number of stories I have covered or been involved with in my career and seen what a great difference transplants can make.

Mind you, as I'm sure you can guess, I've had a fair bit of ribbing over it.

I won't go into details but I am assured there are some parts of my anatomy which could be recycled.

Seriously, though I've a feeling we can rely on your support. If we can't help Katherine we c an maybe help lots of others like her.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.