I come from a slightly unusual family in that my father is a kidney transplant surgeon, and he was very much involved at the sort of frontier times, in terms of the setting up of the transplant unit at the Royal Free Hospital. So from a very early age I was exposed to the language of transplantation, and have always been interested in that from a distance. And whilst I was training to become a surgeon, my main focus was really just to do surgery well and specialise in an area of general surgery – colorectal surgery, which was my intention. But I still had time to make that final commitment in terms of a decision, and rather fortuitously, you could say, my father had a retirement do, and at that retirement do there was a whole load of his old patients, and we sort of met several hundred patients in this room at the Royal Free Hospital. And the conversation was very much sort of ‘When did my father transplant you?’ and talk to the patients and find out a bit more about them and their backgrounds and how many years they’ve had successfully from their transplants. And there was one gentleman standing there, and my brother asked him ‘When did my father transplant you?’ And he said, ‘He didn’t transplant me, he transplanted my wife.’ And so my brother said to him ‘OK, where is your wife?’, and we looked around, and he said ‘Oh no, she’s not here, she died five years ago. Your father transplanted ten years ago, and she died five years ago, but those five years were the best five years of our married life, and I’m here to say thank you to him.”

So, that was quite a powerful moment for me, because, like a thunderbolt, it made me think ‘Hang on, this is a specialty that’s unique, and this is a specialty that has a major impact on individuals; and I would like to be part of that.’ So, when I went roughly a week later to my – it’s called an ARCP annual review of competency progression, where you’re sitting in front of a panel, and you have to declare which specialty you’re going for – the word transplantation left my mouth, which seemed to take people by surprise because prior to that they were assuming that I’d be going down the colorectal route. So, that’s my story with that.