A change of heart

For a long time, many people believed that a lot of what we now regard as brain stuff lived in the heart. Or perhaps in the liver. Somewhere in reference 2, Paul Bloom charts the way the majority view changed in favour of the brain, in the course of which he mentions this memoir, reference 1, by the recipient of a heart-lung transplant who believed that something of the personality of the donor came with the plumbing. A memoir which I have now read.

The author was a vaguely religious person who was into what I might call New Age stuff, a lot of which runs counter to the regular medical view of how things are. She must also have been pretty gutsy.

She was born in 1940, died in 2009, around twenty years after her transplant. She was brought up in New York and lived for most of her life in New England. A professional dancer who was chronically ill for years before her transplant. She went on, after her transplant, to do a lot of dream related therapy – having come from an originally Russian family in which there was lots of discussion of the previous night’s dreams. She meditated on a daily basis. She also joined or ran a number of transplant support groups, went to conferences and appeared on television.

New Age apart, she makes one point, bearing in mind that she was writing more than twenty years ago, that I did take on: that is to say that our medical teams go to a huge amount of time and trouble to fix our plumbing, in this case the heart and lungs, but do not always put a proportionate effort into dealing with the attendant mental problems. Which I can well believe can be both considerable and troubling, particularly in a case like hers where there is a rather abrupt shift from long-term near death to reasonable (if heavily medicated) health. I associate to once reading about a lady who had been blind for a long time, who was partially cured, but found it all so upsetting that she elected to go back to being blind. A story I cannot presently put my hand on.

A transplant is, or at least was, a very serious and risky operation. But, in this case, if it comes off, a new heart makes all kinds of stuff possible which was not possible before. Going beyond going for runs and going for swims, one might trust one body to get angry, to get emotional, which one did not before. It seems quite likely that there are going to be various mental changes along with the physical ones. That there are going to be changes in one’s personality.

I was impressed by the possibility that a new kidney might being new appetites. A kidney is not a pump like a heart, rather a chemical factory – and the thought that a new kidney might be putting new stuff into the blood, as well as taking old stuff out, from where it makes its way to the brain, which it might then influence, does not seem so far fetched.

One part of the regular medical view is that, in the case that the donor is dead, recipients don’t get together with the donor’s family. A ruling which is not that difficult to work around, and this author, after giving the matter considerable thought, did just that. As reported, with a good result all round.

There is a short foreword by Bernie Siegel, a one time surgeon who moved onto New Age. According to Wikipedia he ‘is an Academic Director of the Experiential Health and Healing program at The Graduate Institute in Bethany, Connecticut’. For which see reference 4.

An interesting and easy read. We will see what, if anything, BH makes of it.

PS 1: I worried about how a transplanted heart beat at all. I fairly quickly found out that connections to the central nervous systems are indeed lost, at least for a while, years rather than months, but that the beating of the heart is controlled by its own electrical sub-system, a sub-system involving things like the sinoatrial and the atrioventricular nodes. The central nervous system regulates but does not drive. At least I think that is the story.

PS 2: I might add that in the case of my own, rather less serious operation, around ten years ago now, that the NHS contained any mental health problems there might have been without my noticing!

References

Reference 1: A Change of Heart: A Memoir – Claire Sylvia, William Novak – 1997. The ghost writer, William Novak, as well as being a writer on his own account, is something of a specialist in celebrity ghost writing.

Reference 2: Descartes’ baby: how the science of child development explains what makes us human – Paul Bloom – 2004.

Reference 3: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/04/descartes-baby.html. The last post on Bloom.

Reference 4: https://learn.edu/. ‘Masters and Graduate Certificate Programs in Education, Health, Psychology, Writing, and Leadership. The Graduate Institute promotes an Integrative and Holistic Worldview through the study of Health, Wellness, Education and Personal and Professional Transformation’.

Reference 5: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/my-heart-belongs-to-tim-1257635.html. Another version of this story.