My own Sliding Doors came in the form of an email: it was May 2013, and I was doing my inbox ‘spring cleaning’- as a result, I came within a hair’s width of deleting what would turn out to be the most important message I’ll ever receive. I had forgotten that I had signed up to the DKMS stem cell registry in the US, so when a message from the organisation came through, I thought it was spam at first. However, I opened it on a lucky impulse, and thank God I did, for it told me that I was a genetic match for an anonymous leukaemia patient who needed my stem cells in order to receive a life-saving bone marrow transplant.

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