LINDA Owen’s twins, Eilidh and Callum were born by emergency caesarian, two weeks premature.

When she was 34 weeks into her pregnancy, Ms Owen was diagnosed with dilated cardiomyopathy – her heart was swollen and functioning at around 19 per cent capacity. In truth it was more failing than functioning. Was it scary? “Just a touch”, she says.

After the birth, the 35-year-old mother, from Waterbeck, near Lockerbie, was unable to leave hospital, and was put on an emergency heart transplant list. Five weeks later a donor was identified and she had a seven-hour operation.

“I had no idea I had a heart problem until I was pregnant,” she said. “I began to suffer shortness of breath, my legs and ankles were swollen. But those symptoms can come with pregnancy anyway, so it was out of the blue.”

She was among those celebrating 25 years of heart transplantation in Scotland at a special ceremony yesterday [Fri] at the Golden Jubilee Hospital, in Clydebank, where she had her surgery. The hospital has seen more than 350 patients receive transplants since 1991.

The event also saw Scotland’s oldest heart transplant survivor, 73-year- old Robert Colville meet Professor David Wheatley, himself 75, the surgeon who carried out his life-saving operation.

Mr Colville said it was extraordinary how commonplace such incredible surgery had become. “Back in the day if you said you had a heart transplant you got to the front of the queue, now if it comes up it’s like you’ve had a cold,” he explained. “I can remember in 1967 when I was working for Rolls Royce. Someone came in with a newspaper and said, ‘Look, they’ve had the first heart transplant’. I said, ‘I wonder what that would be like.’ I never imagined it would be me.” His operation 24 years ago was transformative, he said. “I felt alive after the transplant. Beforehand I was always feeling ill.”

The operations remain challenging and something of an ordeal for the surgeons, as well as the patients, as they have to spend hours of intense concentration on their feet. Professor Wheatley, who performed the first heart transplant in Scotland in 1991, recalled his early days performing transplants in Scotland – including flying to Glasgow with a donor heart in a tiny prop plane.

He said: “At the time I started in Scotland in 1992, we were having to go and pick up a donor heart and it could be anywhere in the UK. You could spend about 12 hours fetching the heart and getting it back and then you had to do the operation and look after the patient. It was a weekend gone, so it was very tiring.”

Heart transplants are the final line of treatment for the 45,000 Scots whose lives have been threatened or limited by heart failure. First Minister Nicolas Sturgeon took part in the anniversary event, and praised the efforts of the NHS staff at the hospital. Linda’s twins are fine while she is back to life as normal, working in the NHS, volunteering at the Guides and curling. She too paid tribute to staff at the hospital, and to donors, and urged families to respect the wishes of relatives who carry donor cards.

“I was very lucky to get a donor and I’m so grateful to them and their family,” she said.