A 10-year-old boy after receiving a heart transplant from an adult has thoughts of an adult. A 50-year-old man after a heart transplant had the same habits and personalities as his heart donor.
What do you think of those things? The scientific explanations will be given in the VTV Special Program "Forever Heartbeat" which is scheduled to air at 20:10 on September 23, 2020 on VTV1.
A person's passing does not mean that life will end. The heart of a brain-dead person, if being donated, can revive another person and that heart will not rest, but still exist in this life. The heartbeat will stop, if the patient with brain death does not donate. But when the donor's heart is grafted in a chest of a person who has heart failure, it means his heart still beats.
The idea of the film Forever Heartbeat came up to Tran Huy in 2015, after the producer was meeting leading experts in cardiology in Vietnam and study more documents on the internet about the change in the personality, habits and preferences of heart transplant recipients in the world. Such changes do not occur on all heart transplant patients, however, in the world and even in Vietnam, there have been such cases of transformation.
Three years after concepting and researching, Tran Huy and his colleagues found characters for the film, and continue to pursue them for another 2 years to record the thrilling things the heart recipients felt. The heart is the most important organ in the body. To date, the changes of the person when receiving heart transplant are still hypothesis that many scientists set out. In this film, the film crew will answer the questions surrounding that hypothesis with the scientific opinions of leading cardiologist in Vietnam.
The hardest part of a movie is finding a character. "We have failed to convince three heart transplant characters before. It wasn't until early 2018 that I found my first character in Hue City, a 52-year-old man with a trans-Vietnam heart transplant. After the surgery, this character has a hobby of eating stir-fried noodles, prefers to take care of flowers, and these habits coincide with those of the heart donor", Huy said.
And in mid-2019, they found the second character to receive a successful heart transplant, a 10-year-old boy from Tay ethnic group. After a heart transplant, he became much healthier and more mature who always cares about and thinks for his parents. He was grafted with a heart from a nice man,
"However, when we found the character, we were only halfway there. Another difficulty of the film is whether the character cooperates and is willing to share his story with us or not. And whether they have the changes we expect. There is no better way than to live their lives, treat them like our loved ones," Huy said.
Heart transplant technique is not a new topic for documentary production, however, no film has been referring to the change in personality and thinking of people after heart transplant. "The more we studied, the more thrilling is the problem", Huy said, adding that in the world, there are many patients who change their personality, habits and preferences after a heart transplant. Strangely, those things are similar to the personality, habits, preferences of the donor. The special and lucky feature of the film is that it recorded the first meeting, completely voluntary, between the heart donor family and the family of the heart recipient who is the Tay ethnic child.
The film also mentions the humiliation of the wife and children of the donor, when subjected to blame, suspicion from neighbors and relatives who said she in fact sold her husband's organ. The film also depicts the loneliness of the wife who lost her husband and her young son who lacks the love and attention of his father. The donor family's losses were finally partially offset when they met the recipient's family again, learned that her husband's heart, still healthy, persisted and revived a child. For them, it is more important than any compensation. Through the film, the film crew hopes that people, especially those in the countryside, will have the right view and understand the meaning of organ donation to save lives.
