A TEENAGER given just weeks to live as a baby has passed nine GCSEs, despite having to sit his exams in hospital.

Yesterday Luke Biggs, from Alexander Close, Abingdon, was with friends opening their envelopes and celebrating results at John Mason School.

Luke, 16, was born with Total Hirschsprungs disease – a bowel abnormality – and has spent much of his life in hospital, undergoing two bowel transplants.

His hospital bed at the John Radcliffe Hospital was his revision room and the hospital ICT room was his exam hall.

He said: “It was surreal because you don’t expect to be doing exams there – GCSEs are one of those major things in your life and I was doing them in hospital.

“Everyone was trying to get me out of hospital before GCSEs but I was just too ill, so we asked if there was any way I could do them in hospital.

“I’m overjoyed – I didn’t expect to get grades as good as I did.”

Luke got two Bs, five Cs, two Ds and two distinctions in IT – enough to secure him his place at Abingdon and Witney College for his media BTEC. He wants to go into the film industry – perhaps as a cameraman.

When he was just days old at the JR his parents were told he would die as a baby. He had three operations within weeks of being born.

His dad Ian Biggs, 46, said: “They said he’d got no chance, that there was nothing we could do but take him home and watch him pass away.

“But we demanded a second opinion and they said if he could last until five he could have a bowel transplant. I’m so proud and over the moon for him.”

Luke had his first bowel transplant at eight and his second at 13 in 2010 at Birmingham Children’s Hospital after his body rejected the first.

He said: “It is quite hard to revise in hospital because there are nurses coming in every five minutes for check-ups or hospital alarms going off because someone else has taken a turn for the worse.”

Luke was at the British Transplant Games in Sheffield last week where he won a silver medal in table tennis, a bronze in archery and a bronze in the team tug-of-war.

He was also a Paralympic torchbearer and carried the flame through central London last year.

Assistant head at John Mason School, Chris Davies, said: “He’s an example – he has done amazing things against all adversity.”