WHEN I was 14 my biology teacher gave the class a lesson on blood pressure.

Just as teenage interest started to wane, he produced a monitor, the old-fashioned kind you still see in some doctor's surgeries with a stethoscope, a dial and a pump. I was picked to test it.

He looked puzzled when the cuff had finished its work, inflating and deflating, the little red line rising and rising and falling and eventually settling.

He took another reading, and concluded that the machine was broken.

The lesson moved on and it was forgotten. By everyone but me. Perhaps some things stick in your mind for a reason.

It was another 16 years before I knew that the machine had been working perfectly that day in biology.

I had come to dread the cuff being wound around my arm, willing myself to relax as the band tightened, but that very high reading I got at subsequent GP appointments through my teens and 20s had not been "white coat syndrome".

After I bought my first flat at 30 and moved to the East End of Glasgow, my new GP took one reading and sent me for urgent tests. It wasn't normal, she said, for a young woman to have the blood pressure of an unfit, overweight 70-year-old.

A chest X-ray and a very intuitive specialist was all it took to diagnose what had caused my blood pressure to average 160/100.

My aorta, the main artery in the human body that takes blood from the heart around the body, was almost entirely blocked off and had been since birth.

Over the years, it had narrowed further, causing my blood pressure to soar unchallenged. The high pressure in my upper body had actually deformed my ribs.

I remember my mind clouding as the specialist told me, gently, that I needed open heart surgery, drawing a diagram of the heart's intricate chambers and valves that I struggled to focus on. Things moved quickly after that.

I saw a cardiologist who simply shook her head when I told her I had recently run a half marathon - apparently I could have died during it.

Little things made sense, the agonising cramps in my legs on a long run (because the blood couldn't circulate properly). The purple toe I had as a child, caused by poor circulation in my lower limbs. The heart murmur I had as a baby, that hadn't been followed up.

How do you cope when you know you are facing open heart surgery, unexpectedly as an adult?

Like anything health related, and serious, it is far harder for your loved ones. I worried privately but simply put my faith in the doctors and didn't dwell on the possibility that anything could go wrong.

I was first in the queue at 9.30am at the Royal Infirmary, or Hotel Royale as it became known.The last thing I remember was my brother, Ewen, placing drawings my young nephews had created for me in front of my face as I was wheeled down to theatre.

The first thing I remember afterwards, the feeling of a hand softly stroking mine and a voice whispering in my ear that everything was OK (my sister Lorraine).

The operation took about nine hours and involved the surgeon cutting out the narrowed part of my aorta and sewing in a 2cm plastic tube.

My body had built its own system of arteries to try to bypass my blocked aorta - called collateral, a fact that still amazes me.

In the weeks after the surgery, the arteries gradually died, their job done.

Unfortunately, because my condition lay undiagnosed for so long, it caused another problem. A section of my aorta has grown too big and has formed an aneurysm. It is life-threatening but is closely monitored and if it reaches a certain diameter, then they will operate to remove it.

One day, I, too will have a scar that runs down my breastbone like others in the exhibition.

Why did Jenny, Liza and I decide to organise this exhibition? We saw it as a celebration of survival and medical advance but also wanted to highlight current gaps in care.

When I left hospital I was handed a bundle of booklets for people who are recovering from a heart attack, not the same thing at all. Scotland is facing an acute shortage of

specialists in congenital heart disease.

More importantly, there is a need for improved psycho-logical support.

When I look at my scar, almost 10 years on, I give thanks for the NHS and the incredible skill of my surgeon, Jim Pollock, who has repaired babies' hearts the size of walnuts as well as mine.

I hope he is enjoying his well-earned retirement.