Help Jenny Fight for Her Life — and Have a Home to Come Back To

Some people are born fighters. Our darling Jenny has been one since she was four years old.

In 1984, a little girl, my sister, was rushed from our family home to King’s College Hospital London, desperately ill. She was just four years old, and doctors discovered she had a rare and devastating condition — congenital hepatic fibrosis — a genetic liver disease she had been born with, that had been quietly damaging her body from her very first breath.

What followed was not a childhood. It was a battle.

Jenny spent the next nine years as an inpatient at King’s College London, one of the country’s leading specialist centres, enduring months away from home, from school, from the normal life every child deserves. In 1990, at just ten years old, she underwent a major life-saving liver shunt operation to relieve the dangerous pressure building in her portal vein. Slowly, courageously, she recovered.

For a few precious years, life got a little easier.

But the same cruel syndrome that had attacked her liver had also been silently destroying her kidneys. Jenny’s kidneys began to fail. What followed were years of gruelling home dialysis — nine hours every single night, tethered to a machine just to stay alive, her world shrinking to the walls of her home and the rhythmic hum of a dialysis machine while the rest of the world slept.

Then, in January 2017, came the call that changed everything. A matching donor kidney had been found.

Jenny underwent her second major operation to have donor kidney transplanted. And something remarkable happened. She got her life back.

She returned to the career she loved, as an Internal Talent Recruitment Manager within the pharmaceutical industry — building something meaningful, something she was brilliant at, something that was entirely hers. She worked hard. She lived fully. She never once took a single ordinary day for granted, because she knew better than anyone how precious ordinary days are.

Then, in January 2026 of this year, Jenny was admitted to the Royal Sussex County Hospital in Brighton.

She has been there, back and forth, for over 5 months now.

The liver that has fought alongside her for 45 years is failing. A serious secondary liver abscess infection has taken hold, and her doctors have now told her the words that stop your heart — she needs a liver transplant. Without one, Jenny’s life is in serious danger.

She has been placed on the transplant waiting list. But a matching donor liver cannot be ordered or hurried. It requires a stranger, somewhere in the country, to have made the selfless decision to donate their organs — and then it requires the call to come in time.

The average wait for a liver transplant in the UK can be many months. Some patients wait over a year. Every day on that list is a day of uncertainty, of hope held tightly alongside fear, of a family watching and waiting and willing the phone to ring.

This would be Jenny’s third major organ intervention in a lifetime already defined by extraordinary medical battles. She has faced every one of them with a courage that takes your breath away.

She is fighting. Of course she is. Jenny has never done anything else.

But while she fights for her life in a hospital bed, connected to tubes and monitors, her life outside has been quietly falling apart.

She has not been able to work. She has had no income for six months. The rent has gone unpaid. The bills have mounted. Friends who love her have lent what they could. And now, heartbreakingly, her landlord has had no choice but to serve her an eviction notice.

Jenny is facing the very real possibility of being discharged from hospital — after everything she has been through, after everything she is still going through — with nowhere to go home to.

No one should have to fight for their life and their home at the same time.

We are asking for your help.

Every pound raised will go directly toward clearing Jenny’s rent arrears and bills, so that when she is discharged, she has a safe, stable home to recover in. A place to rest. A place to heal. A place that is hers — somewhere she can be well enough and strong enough to receive the transplant that will save her life when that call finally comes.

Because that call must find her ready. It must find her stable. It must find her with a roof over her head and the best possible chance of surviving the surgery that follows. A person cannot recover from a liver transplant without a home. She needs both — and right now, one of those things is something we can actually give her.

Jenny has spent forty years giving this fight everything she has. She has faced things most of us will never have to imagine, with a grace and courage that is humbling beyond words.

She deserves to come home.

If you can give anything — five pounds, ten pounds, whatever you can spare — please know that it is not a small thing. It is part of the foundation we are trying to build beneath her feet, so that when she walks out of that hospital, she has somewhere to land.

And if you cannot give financially, please share this page. Share it widely. Share it with everyone you know. You never know whose heart it might reach.

There is one more thing we ask — if you are not already registered as an organ donor, please consider signing up today at www.organdonation.nhs.uk. It costs nothing. It takes two minutes. And for someone like Jenny, it is everything.

Thank you, from the bottom of our hearts, for reading Jenny’s story. She has been fighting since she was four years old.

Help us make sure she still has a home to fight for — and a future to fight towards.

With love and desperate hope,

Jenny’s family