'I knew I was in a position to save her life, so I did' - Yorkshire show-jumper Letty Fenlon on donating part of her liver

To this day, she is not 100 per cent sure how it came to appear on her feed, but there was something about the plight of this little Glasgow girl that seemed to strike a chord with Letty – a 28-year-old show-jumper and gritter driver from Ripon.

Diagnosed with Biliary Atresia – a rare liver disease that blocks the bile ducts – shortly after birth, little Helin Dinler’s parents had been told she would die within 18 months without a successful transplant. As her condition worsened, she was placed on the nationwide transplant donor’s list, but with no suitable matches found, time was fast running out.

Meanwhile, having read through Helin’s entire heartbreaking story, Letty had decided, almost immediately, that she was going to help. “I'd seen the story on her mum’s Facebook post. I think someone I am friends with in Scotland must have shared it, but I’m not really sure,” she says. “After reading it, I just thought ‘why not?’ and I put my name forward to see if they would want to talk to me. They were obviously very keen and things happened really quickly after that.

"It's so hard to find donors that fit the criteria because you have to be under a certain BMI, a non-drinker, a non-smoker, and relatively healthy. So the number of suitable people is pretty slim. They had a lot of people applying to help, but I was the only one who ticked all the boxes. Less than a month after seeing the Facebook post I was signed up and ready for surgery.

“Helin’s condition had gone rapidly downhill and we needed to act fast. The next thing I know, I am writing out my will, finding someone to look after my horses and being dropped off at St James’ Hospital in Leeds. My partner had to park the horse box in an ambulance bay and I jumped out to get prepped for surgery.”

The six-hour operation to remove and transplant a third of her liver was carried out successfully – a procedure that would leave a deep six inch scar from breast plate to belly button and which has a death rate of one in every 200 worldwide. While she admits to being understandably nervous, nothing was going to stop her from seeing it through.

“My partner was kind of the reason I was doing it. He's got a son. And I think I just realised how much parents love their children, if that makes sense,” she says. “I don’t have much experience with children but I am devoted to my horses and I know it sounds stupid, but when my best horse had a career-ending injury, I found myself frantically looking around to see if anyone could help us.

“He's still alive, thank God. But for a long time, it was looking like we were going to lose him and I was thinking, you know, if there was anything at all that I could do to fix him, I would. And that must have been how this family was feeling, except with literally their child. You can understand that desperation, the feeling of being helpless to save the person or animal that you love. I knew I was in a position to save her life, so I did.”

In truth, the hardest part for Letty was the recovery process. Laying around doing nothing was never going to be easy for someone who looks after eight of her own horses, works at the Johnston Racing Stables in Middleham and who drives gritters and snow ploughs across North Yorkshire in the winter.

“I took a degree in languages and I speak Russian, French and Arabic, so it could be said that driving gritter trucks is a strange choice,” she previously told The Yorkshire Post. “Once I finished my degree I didn’t want to go out and get a real job straight away… I wanted to continue riding my horses to compete internationally.

“A lady at my yard told me how her husband had driven gritters and she suggested that it would be perfect for me because, generally when they need the gritters to clear the roads, we can’t ride anyway.”

Letty still finds time to compete in show-jumping events around the country – her passion to which everything else in her life is designed to support. “First week out of hospital I was going absolutely stir crazy but luckily a friend came and took me out to see the horses,” she says, reflecting back on the transplant.

“I was told not to ride for three months, but I sat on one at three weeks because I wanted to get back and compete at the Great Yorkshire Show in July. I chose my best behaved horse Bang, who I had nursed back to health a couple of years earlier from a broken leg, and now here he was helping me. It was as if he knew I needed him. People said I was mad to try and ride at the Great Yorkshire Show. I’d had the operation at the end of May and a little more than two months later there I was bounding around the main ring with a huge smile on my face. It was very painful, but it was worth it.”

One year on from their operations, both Letty and Helin are doing well. While they have yet to meet, Letty does receive regular video updates from the parents who are constantly expressing their gratitude to this ‘girl with a huge heart’. The next challenge for Letty will be to kick start her show-jumping career once again, aiming to step back up to international level with the hope of finding some sponsorship to help her along on the way.

“If this experience has taught me anything, it is that you have to grab life when you can and really give it a good go,” she says. “Riding is my passion and if I can find some backing then who knows where it might take me. It would certainly be nice to have a little slice of good luck…”

To sponsor Letty, email [email protected]