World record for lung transplant recipient

At the age of 47, her survival was a race against the clock but the life-giving power of organ transplantation carried Vera Dwyer through another quarter of a century and into the record books.

The 73-year-old from Ballinafad, Co Sligo has been officially certified as “the longest-surviving single lung transplant recipient in the world” by the Guinness Book of Records.

The great-grandmother underwent a pioneering lung transplant operation in the Royal Brompton and Harefield Hospital in London in 1988 after her lungs began to fail because of a condition called fibrosis alveolitis — a progressive thickening of the walls of the air sacs of the lungs. She had just days to live.