Picking up her one-year-old son, Levi, at home after her heart transplant operation, the first thing you notice about Leonnee Pinchen-Martin is her smile, a genuine ear-to-ear grin.

She has had to wait five months to give him a genuine cuddle, with the 20cm scar on her chest still going through the healing process.

Arriving home to Tamworth last month, Leonnee said she was feeling healthy and was even looking forward to going back to work.

"I felt so good a week after the transplant that I finished off a work project in hospital," laughed Leonnee, who held an art director position in Sydney before she became ill.

Her mum, Kath Martin, who gave up work to become her daughter's full-time carer, said, with tears in her eyes, the difference in Leonnee was incredible.

"Before the transplant she was like the saggy, baggy elephant all sunken eyes and so skinny and now she has the colour back in her face," Kath said.

After receiving her new heart on Good Friday, Leonnee spent months at St Vincent's hospital, with her mum, son and husband Joe at her side.

A cocktail of vitamins and anti-rejection drugs and a strict doctor's schedule meant the young mum had to stay in Sydney while she recuperated from the life-saving transplant.

Arriving home last month, Leonnee was finally able to have the bubble bath with her son that she had been waiting for since she was first diagnosed with periopartum cardiomyopathy while pregnant.

Kath said little Levi, who spent most of his young life with his mum while in hospital, had become so popular with the ward nurses that they would playfully fight over who would babysit him.

"They all fell in love with him, it was like a big family," she said.

Leonnee and Kath said they had an extended family in their transplant group, with whom they shared accommodation, clinics and rehab sessions, growing close to some members.

A 12-year-old girl waiting for a new heart touched Leonnee in particular, when she heard her crying in bed next door to her in intensive care one night.

"We were strangers but we were all going through the same ordeal," Leonnee said.

"Her name was Rachel, and I think about her all the time."

Leonnee said she wanted to remind people about the significance of organ donation and that Australia had one of the lowest rates in the world, with people on waiting lists for a suitable donor for years.

"She was just so lucky she only had to wait eight months," Kath said.

Leonnee said laws prevented her from knowing who the donor of her new heart was, but that one day she would sit down and write a letter to the family to tell them how thankful she was.

"I would like to find out whose heart I have," she said.

Although she is not completely out of the woods, with a regimen of pills for the rest of her life and monthly trips to Sydney for biopsies, Leonnee said she was only thinking about the positives.

"I'm so grateful," she said.

She thanked the nurses, surgeons and friends and family who supported her throughout the past year.