Dad, 39, told he had two years to live after he suddenly ‘felt funny’ while playing football
A dad who was told he had just two years left with his family before the end of his life has said he now feels ‘incredibly positive about the future’ following a major transplant.
Ellis Dawson led a busy and stressful life, often spending time working away through his job as a software product director.
Raising two daughters, and also spending his time juggling playing football and cycling, everything changed in a tragic instant.
While playing a football match last January, Ellis told of how he suddenly ‘felt funny’ and his condition quickly got worse. He began vomiting and suffering what he suspected was a panic attack.
“I started to feel funny mid-game,” he said. “I went in goal for 15 minutes or so to see if the feeling would clear up, but it got worse and I knew something more serious was up.
Ellis with his partner after leaving the transplant centre (Manchester University of NHS Foundation Trust)
“I walked back to my car and it became clear I was in no
state to drive. My chest was hurting and my left arm ached a lot, so I called my dad to pick me up.
“When I got home I spoke to my wife about it, in my head I knew they were heart attack symptoms but I always imagined a heart attack to feel like a much more serious emergency situation.
“I then started being sick and thought it was a panic attack so used calming breathing techniques and fell asleep on the floor. My wife found me and after reading up on the symptoms, feared I would be ᴅᴇᴀᴅ in the morning.”
Ellis had ‘widow maker’ blockage
Ellis went to A&E at Royal Stoke University Hospital where he had an ECG, confirming he was having a heart attack.
Two stents had to be inserted to open up his left anterior descending artery, which had become 95 percent blocked with a blood clot.
“I was still walking around convinced nothing was wrong, but it definitely wasn’t the case,” he explained. “We later learned that the artery is colloquially called ‘the widow-maker’ because blockages here are so often fatal in men.
Ellis in hospital (Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust)
“I always remember when I was moaning about not being able to run, one of my consultants said: ‘At the moment you just need to be grateful you’re alive and that you didn’t go into cardiac arrest.’ It really hit home for me how serious it was.”
“I got the news I’d have two years to live… which was a mᴀssive shock”
Once Ellis’ stay in hospital was complete, an echocardiogram was conducted which showed his heart hadn’t healed.
Six months later, a follow-up MRI found there had still not been an improvement in his heart and Ellis received the news he would need to meet the team at Wythenshawe Hospital’s Heart and Lung Transplant Centre.
“It was pretty wild getting that news,” he said. “I had been warned at the start it may be a pathway I had to take, so it wasn’t too much of a shock as I’d already been on quite a journey by then.
“Because I was fit and
, albeit with a heart under significant stress, they were open to getting me on the list quickly. I still couldn’t run but was functioning in terms of basic life, I was still working and being a dad.
“Then I got the news that on my current meds, I’d have two years to live at best, which was a mᴀssive shock.”
By the December, Ellis was struggling with his walking and breathing due to his heart not pumping enough fluid around.
He spent Christmas with his loved ones, but said he could ‘barely pick up my kids’ and ‘struggled so badly’.
“I went on an intravenous (IV) drip and dropped a lot of fluid immediately,” he said. “The IV revitalised me and I was in a good space during my stay, I was on the hospital bike and exercising.
“It all felt promising even though I was having constant short ventricular tachycardia events – so my heart was really not happy.”
Ellis now says he’s optimistic about the future (Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust)
Transplant surgery saved Ellis’ life
After attending Wythenshawe Hospital in south Manchester the following a month, a donor heart became available despite only two weeks of waiting. He went on to have the surgery on 31 January.
“I was super lucky and a heart became available, I couldn’t believe my luck that I’d only been waiting two weeks as the wait is usually much, much longer.
“The feeling of excitement that it might happen was mᴀssive, I felt pretty
and focused for the next few days.
“I kept myself focused, continued exercising and mentally preparing. It got very emotional but before I knew it the procedure had begun and I awoke a day later.
“On my first day I was able to sit in a chair and I started eating pretty quickly. Two and a half weeks of progress later I was allowed home.
“Knowing that the NHS is the only provider of heart transplant care in the UK makes you realise just how exceptionally
and knowledgeable the team truly are.”
He continued: “Since leaving I have had to adapt, the biggest thing now is my immunosuppression, so I have to consciously be aware of what I do day to day.
“I try to avoid public transport, supermarkets, any kind of busy enclosed spaces where I can, but for the most part I am back to a normal life.
“Fatigue is a bit of a battle at the moment, I have to manage my energy properly across every day which can be tough to balance with work.
“It’s the same with my kids, they certainly don’t slow down for me. Although I have been glad to have them on my own as my wife really needed a break – she has done so much to manage the family when I was ill.
“It’s been a
recovery and the new heart genuinely felt like a quick fix, my chest hurt for the first few weeks from being cut open, but I’m otherwise fine.”
Ellis is now supporting the team who saved him (Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust)
Ellis said he now feels ‘incredibly positive’ about the future despite the ordeal.
He now plans to join some of his transplant peers from Wythenshawe Hospital and enter this year’s Transplant Games in the football category, something he said will be very emotional as the last match he played was the one during which he had his heart attack.
He added: “You would think I would be making wild and crazy plans, but honestly, having my everyday routine back is the greatest feeling.
“When you have been on the cusp of losing it all, you just want your normal life back. My biggest priority now is to stay as fit and healthy as I can to truly honour the
I have received.”
💔 STELLA PARTON BREAKS HER SILENCE — What She Said About Dolly’s Health Has Fans Looking Back
Dolly Parton’s Sister Breaks Silence What Really Happened - GMT - G1
Stella Parton was born May 4, 1949, the sixth of twelve children raised by Robert Lee and Avie Lee Parton in Sevierville, Tennessee — a household defined by noise, limited money, and almost no privacy, the kind of environment that produced strong, determined personalities.
Stella was one of them.
By seven, she was appearing alongside her older sister Dolly on a Knoxville television program; by her teens, she was writing her own songs, though marriage and motherhood pulled music to the margins of her life for a stretch.
The dream never fully disappeared.
In 1967, she recorded a gospel album with her mother and sisters, and later worked clubs in Washington, D.C., before founding her own record label in 1975 and releasing “I Want to Hold You in My Dreams Tonight,” which climbed to number nine on the country charts.
Long before any of that commercial success, Stella had already shown a willingness to take positions others avoided.
At 26, amid backlash against Australian singer Olivia Newton-John for winning recognition in country music, Stella recorded “Ode to Olivia” in her defense — a stand that offered her no career benefit and real risk of criticism, but one she took anyway simply because she believed staying silent was the wrong choice.
That instinct defined the rest of her career: hits like “The Danger of a Stranger” and “Steady as the Rain” (written by Dolly) built a genuine, independent following, including in the U.K., while Stella also worked in New York theater and spoke openly, often controversially, about poverty, domestic violence, and the treatment of women in the music industry.
She was named the Christian Country Music Association’s Female Vocalist of the Year in 2004.
Through all of it, she remained defined publicly, more often than not, as simply “Dolly’s little sister” — a label she spent five decades quietly proving didn’t tell the full story.
That same directness is why her comments in the fall of 2025 carried real weight.
Stella had never positioned herself as the family’s image manager or spokesperson; she was, by reputation, someone who believed difficult truths shouldn’t stay hidden indefinitely.
What she described wasn’t dramatic or accusatory — it was a portrait of a woman who had spent years prioritizing everyone else’s needs over her own.
The context mattered.
Carl Dean, Dolly’s husband of nearly sixty years, died in March 2025 at 82, after a long illness during which Dolly had devoted herself almost entirely to his care.
She later acknowledged that in the process, she’d neglected her own health significantly.
The loss reverberated through the whole extended family — the Partons had lost three brothers in the years surrounding this period, compounding grief that, for a family that had once crowded twelve children into a single small home, meant losing pieces of a shared childhood one after another.
Stella herself went seven years without releasing new music during this stretch, later describing the period simply as one shaped by sorrow, while still speaking about the importance of finding moments of laughter within it.
Looking back, one moment reads very differently in hindsight than it did at the time: in late September 2025, Dolly postponed her planned Las Vegas residency, citing health challenges — a rare cancellation for a performer whose six-decade career had included very few of them.
At the time, most fans treated it as a minor, temporary setback.
Stella’s later reflections suggested the signs had actually been building for some time, visible to family in ways the public smile made easy to miss.
That concern crystallized publicly not long after, when Dolly’s younger sister Frieda posted a simple request on Facebook asking fans to pray for Dolly.
What looked at first like an ordinary, well-meaning gesture spread rapidly, sparking widespread speculation about how serious Dolly’s condition actually was.
Dolly herself responded directly within days, appearing in a video from a Grand Ole Opry commercial shoot, insisting with her familiar humor that she wasn’t finished yet — the now widely remembered “I ain’t dead yet” moment that briefly quieted public concern.
In the months that followed, the pattern repeated: reassuring updates about kidney stones, dehydration, and treatment, paired with continued work on new projects, right up until Dolly Parton’s death on August 25, 2026, at 80.
Looking back across that full timeline — the postponed residency, the family’s public worry, Stella’s own account of a sister who consistently deprioritized her own wellbeing — it becomes easier to see what the people closest to Dolly understood well before the rest of the world did: that the warmth and resilience the public saw every time she appeared on camera came at a real, largely invisible cost.
