BRAVE teenager Charlene Henry is in a race against time as doctors battle to find a kidney that will save her life.

The 17-year-old, from West Denton, Newcastle, has had her name added to the transplant list and is waiting for a suitable donor to be found.

But in six months' time she will celebrate her 18th birthday - which means she will lose the priority given to children waiting for transplants.

Her sister, Danielle, 23, said: "When a suitable kidney is found, children are always given top priority. Most of those on the dialysis ward are very young, maybe five or six.

"But my sister turns 18 in a few months' time, so we are praying they find her a donor before then.

"If she doesn't get the transplant quickly, she faces being stuck on a dialysis machine for good.

"She's a teenage girl who can't even go out with her friends because she's got a tube up her nose."

Charlene was born with a diaphragmatic hernia, a rare condition which meant her organs were placing severe pressure on her lungs.

Doctors advised her parents, Pauline and Thomas, to take a photograph of their sick daughter so they would have something to remember her by if she didn't survive.

But despite undergoing major surgery hours after she was born, Charlene refused to give up the fight for life.

And she has been battling on ever since.

She spends up to six hours a day, three-times a week, on dialysis at Newcastle's Royal Victoria Infirmary.

She said: "I go to school in the morning and then to hospital in the afternoon. They started me on dialysis as soon as my kidneys collapsed last year."