But when Jo Ward took baby Tyler home from hospital she could never have known that within days her world would be turned upside down by complications caused by the birth which she says “literally broke my heart”. The delivery had been routine. She was in and out of hospital the same day to return home to husband Darren and elder son Callum. She busied herself with the needs of their new arrival but four days after the birth, she developed searing pains across her shoulder blades. Painkillers prescribed by an out-of-hours doctor failed to have any impact as the pains travelled down her arms and into her jaw. She was left sobbing in agony as she struggled to catch her breath. When a midwife arrived at the family home in Kiveton Park, near Sheffield, the next morning, she took one look at her patient and told Darren to dial 999 for an ambulance. She was taken to hospital in Chesterfield where staff broke the news she had suffered a heart attack. She was transferred to Sheffield’s Northern General Hospital where specialists said a blood clot, believed to be linked to the birth, had split her coronary artery. She underwent emergency double heart bypass surgery the same day. Nearly six years on, the 36-year-old now lives each day with the impact of the damage to her heart which has left her with angina, breathlessness and palpitations. She has recently been fitted with a state-of-the-art pacemaker and has been warned she may need a cardiac transplant. Her story is set to play a key part in the British Heart Foundation’s Mending Broken Hearts appeal launched today to raise £50m for research to find innovative new treatments or even a cure for hundreds of thousands of people in the UK with heart failure. The goal is to make the heart as easy to repair as broken bones. Mrs Ward said when she left hospital after the double heart bypass she hoped to return to fitness and everything would be “back to normal”. But the extent of damage to her heart meant that after her recovery period she realised she was still struggling to do simple tasks. She was initially under strict instructions not to do any lifting and was unable to do anything for her new son. “I wasn’t allowed to pick up my son for three months – that was the hardest thing,” she said. “The nearest was laying him on my lap so I could touch him.” Her condition means “everything from doing the washing to playing silly games” with Tyler, now five, and Callum, 14, are sometimes just too much. She had previously worked as a technical adviser to miners making claims for lung disease but has been unable to return to any kind of work. “It’s really debilitating. Everything makes me tired and breathless and it’s just such an extreme effort to do anything,” she said. “The new pacemaker will buy me some more time and hopefully make my heart work a bit better but it is a last resort.” She had relied on advice from the British Heart Foundation (BHF) during her recovery and had written thanking it for the help, telling the charity “having a baby literally broke my heart”. Her story was now being loosely adapted into a television advertisement as part of the charity’s appeal which marks its 50th anniversary. “It would be fantastic if someone could inject me with some stem cells rather than go through the heart surgery,” she said. “When people think of heart failure, you just think of older people, you don’t necessarily associate it with someone in their mid-30s with two kids. It does affect all sorts of people at all stages of life. “The fact my heart won’t heal can be overwhelming but I refuse to let heart failure define me. A research breakthrough could make a massive difference to people like me, so there is always hope.” Professor Peter Weissberg, medical director at the BHF, said great strides to better diagnose and treat heart patients had been made since the charity was set up. “But the biggest issue that still eludes us is how to help people once their heart has been damaged by a heart attack,” he said. “Scientifically, mending human hearts is an achievable goal and we really could make recovering from a heart attack as simple as getting over a broken leg.” He said the development of a pill that helped the heart renew itself was the Holy Grail for scientists, but conceivable. A cocktail of treatments, or injections to the heart, were other possibilities as well as identifying heart-rebuilding stem cells grown in the laboratory to repair or replace damaged heart muscle. One of the most promising areas of research involves learning lessons from nature to find ways of making the heart heal itself. One research team is studying the zebra fish which can renew its heart and already scientists have had some success in regenerating cells in heart-damaged mice.