Between Two Lungs
Today marks three years since Eva got her double lung transplant and took her first breaths at a new life.
In the years following her life-changing transplant Eva would celebrate by throwing an annual birthday party for her lungs. First birthdays warrant a room full of friends, good music and lots of cupcakes, and no one loved a party more than Eva. By the fall of 2008 she had broken down any director-subject wall I had attempted to put up before. She welcomed me into her life as a friend and I realized for the first time what transplant had really done for her. With healthy lungs, she was free to be her true self, and the person I saw in front of me was totally different from the one that I had been filming for months in a hospital room. This Eva had fire red hair, and was an unstoppable force.
I got an email last night from Eva’s mom and she wrote: “remember where you were three years ago today?”. It’s funny how October 23rd and 24th 2007 are dates that will forever stay in my heart. I remember Eva’s pager going off, and her reaction – total disbelief mixed with pure happiness. For those of you who have seen the film, we often get asked by people if the scene is real – how were we there? Is Eva acting?
No one can fake a reaction like getting The Call. It was chaos. Hand shaking, heart pounding, chaos.
Philip, who co-directed the film was the one shooting that day and I still can’t figure out how he managed to stay in focus and keep his hands steady while I held onto the boom and prayed that the camera battery wouldn’t die or that the tape wouldn’t run out. After the pager went off, it was 36 hours of non-stop filming.
While transplant is not a cure for Cystic Fibrosis (my hope is that one day soon a cure will be found for this terrible disease) what transplant did for Eva was give her more time. I recently interviewed her parents for an updated version of the film, and when I asked Eva’s dad how he felt about organ donation, without hesitation he responded, “transplant worked for Eva.” As Eva said herself, in an interview with David Kincaid for CTV news during the Vancouver International Film Festival last year, “It was better to have breathed and lost than to have never breathed at all.”
When Eva was diagnosed with chronic rejection and put back on the wait list last fall, I didn’t doubt that she would get another set of lungs. A few months earlier we had gone to see a play with her friends and she had met someone who was living with only one lung. I remember her saying that she could manage fine if she was given just one functioning lung. The last time I saw her I remember her saying that the previous night she had come close to death. She remembered coming to consciousness and her arms waving as if she were swimming. She said she had felt as if she was drowning, but at the time she wasn’t ready to go.
I never think about what would have happened if Eva’s pager had gone off a second time. What I think about is the time that I got to spend with her before she left. Whenever I see anything beautiful now, I take a moment to just breathe in deep, and let the love take over.
