Grandad Pat Edgeley, 47, at home in Humberstone, with his grandson Stefan Mitchell, three

Time is fast running out for 47-year-old grandad Pat Edgeley.

His only hope of staying alive is to have a lung transplant operation at Papworth Hospital in Cambridge.

He has been on the waiting list for 14 months and his hopes of a donor being found in time are fading.

Pat, from Humberstone, is one of nearly 300 people in Leicestershire waiting for a transplant operation.

Unless more donors can be found many will die or become too unwell to have life-saving operations.

Over the past few days the Mercury has been highlighting some of the county's remarkable organ donor stories. Pat is desperate not to become one of the statistics.

His problems began about four years ago when he started getting out of breath. Doctors at Leicester's Glenfield Hospital diagnosed fibrosis of the lungs.

It means his lungs are so scarred they have hardened and don't work properly. No-one knows the cause, although it could be down to years working in the building trade and breathing in dust.

However, Pat has had to swap work for a daily regime of medication and cannot breathe without the help of oxygen.

He said: "I have been told it is incurable and the life span for someone diagnosed with the condition is six years."

Due to a previous operation doctors have also said that it might not be as easy to find an organ match for him, because of the presence of antibodies in his system.

Pat said: "If there were more people on the donor register it might make it easier to eventually find a match.

"But I think that even if more people do sign up it will probably be too late for me now. I just don't know. It doesn't just affect me – I will be dead and gone – but it does affect my family which I worry about.

"When I first went on the transplant waiting list my stomach turned every time I had a phone call thinking 'this is it'.

"I had one false alarm last March when I was called in. But I was then sent home because doctors said the lungs were not suitable."

Pat's dream is to have more time with his wife Catherine, 52, and daughters Sadie, 29, Donna, 28, and Claire, 20. Even better would be to get back to playing football with grandsons Caine 10, Lewis, nine, Mason, seven, and Stefan, three.

Pat said: "Agreeing to be a donor is such brave thing to do."

Daughter, Sadie Mitchell, from Beaumont Leys, said: "It has certainly made all of us think twice about organ donation – you never think your family is going to be affected."

Richard Power, a consultant at Leicester's hospitals who is helping spearhead a new campaign to get more donors, said: "Unless more people come forward many of the patients waiting for operations may become too ill to have surgery."