Twenty years ago on Thursday, a North-Easterner become one of the first UK patients to undergo a heart transplant. Remarkably, Joe Burnside is still fit and well and enjoying his retirement. Health Correspondent Barry Nelson meets him at his Darlington home.

JOE Burnside had just hoisted a roll of carpet into a customer's car when he felt excruciating pains in his chest. The Darlington father of three collapsed on the pavement after a massive heart attack, his second within 18 months.

Doctors had already warned him against lifting heavy weights when the carpet firm boss decided to do a favour for a customer in a hurry. Joe's wife, Mary, feared the worst when she was told her husband had had another coronary. "The people in the shop next door came and told me. When I got to the hospital, he looked terrible," she says.

The self-employed businessman, from Yarm Road, Darlington, won his immediate battle for life, but doctors told his family that the outlook was poor because of the damage to his heart and there was nothing that could be done for him.

Mary, now 70, remembers the pitiful state her husband was in when she finally got him home. "He was so weak he couldn't fasten his own shirt or tie his laces. If he tried to go for a walk, he would get to the garden gate and then have to come back," recalls Mary.

At the time, 1979, heart transplantation was still in its infancy.

While Christiaan Barnard had famously performed the world's first heart transplant in Cape Town, South Africa 12 years earlier, very few successful operations had been performed in the UK.

But seeing a newspaper clipping about heart transplant patient Keith Castle, who was one of the pioneers of UK surgery, Mary made the fateful decision to move heaven and earth to give Joe the chance of a similar operation.

When she first raised the issue with doctors at Darlington Memorial Hospital, she was told that it was out of the question.

"They said he was too old, transplants were just pie in the sky and I had to accept that he would just not wake up one morning. I ended up crying in the corridor," says Mary.

Undeterred, she want to see the family's GP later that day and asked whether he could help her husband get a new heart. "We were so desperate that we considered having it done privately. It cost about £100,000 at the time and we thought about selling the house and asking Joe's brothers to chip in," recalls Mary.

The GP was very supportive and agreed to write to the pioneering heart transplant surgeon, Professor Magdi Yacoub - now Sir Magdi Yacoub - at Harefield Hospital near London. Two days later the phone rang. Harefield wanted Joe to go there straight away. Although she was elated at the news, Mary knew that she couldn't tell Joe the real reason they had to make the 500-mile round trip to Harefield.

"I never told Joe because I knew he wouldn't do it. I knew it because we watched a news item on television about Keith Castle and Joe said he would never agree to a transplant," says Mary.

To persuade her husband to make the long journey from the North-East to the Home Counties, Mary concocted a story about meeting a top Harley Street consultant who might have something to help Joe's condition. "He never twigged," says Mary, still pleased at the success of her little white lie all those years ago.

Even when Joe found himself sharing a room with a man who told him he was waiting for a heart transplant, he didn't make the connection. "I told him to take no notice, the man was probably a nutcase," laughs Mary.

It was only when a passing doctor inadvertently let the cat out of the bag that Joe realised the real reason he was occupying a bed at Harefield.

"Joe started crying, he said 'I am not having it done, I am going home'," remembers Mary.

But despite his initial fears, Joe gradually got used to the idea. What helped considerably was the sight of another heart patient, Derek Morris, walking around the hospital grounds after a heart transplant.

"I said 'look at Derek marching up and down like a soldier, that could be you'. That gave Joe a lot of encouragement," says Mary.

After more than three months waiting for a compatible heart - including a false alarm when surgeons decided another heart was not right for Joe - the day finally arrived.

A promising teenage runner, Peter Everett from Liverpool, provided the organ that Joe desperately needed. The previously healthy schoolboy athlete died in hospital after collapsing at the end of an 800 metre race in Manchester. He was just 18 years old.

As well as providing a heart for Joe, the tragic young runner donated two corneas and a kidney to help others. To this day, nearly a quarter of a century since the transplant, Mary's eyes brim with tears at the thought of the young man who died to help her then 50-year-old husband. "It gave Joe a chance to live, you can never forget something like that," she says.

Joe recalls that the night of the operation there was a big storm. "The heart came to Harefield by helicopter and it was really wild," he says.

The morning after the operation, Harefield was besieged by television and newspaper reporters, but Mary resisted parading in front of the cameras because she felt uneasy at benefiting from someone else's loss.

Joe delighted his family by going from strength to strength and apart from a pneumonia scare a few months later, made steady progress.

In the early days Joe had to take handfuls of steroid and anti-rejection pills and have tests virtually every day but now, as one of the veteran survivors of heart transplantation, he only needs a couple of pills a day.

Mary says it is difficult to express how grateful they are for getting a second chance. Twenty four years after his transplant, Joe has seen ten grandchildren grow up and celebrated the birth of his first great grandchild, Henry, two years ago.

Joe, now 74, says he has thoroughly enjoyed the years of extra life granted to him. "I have driven thousands of miles around Europe on family holidays with the caravan and I still like to go out for a pint with my mates at night," says Joe.

Mary and Joe both believe that organ transplantation should have a higher profile in UK life and that the Government should bring in a system where there is an assumption that an individual's organs can be transplanted unless they explicitly object. "It is something that has to be discussed before someone dies," says Mary.

Jo already has a gold pin for passing the 20 year mark and is expecting to see old friends when he goes back to Harefield shortly for his annual "MOT".

With more than 4,700 successful heart transplants already performed in the UK, Joe is hoping that the exclusive club will grow and grow as each year passes.

* For information about organ donation ring the NHS Organ Donor helpline 0845-6060 400.