Heart of a Stranger Movie (true story)

2011-11-27T06:10:00.001-08:00

Heart of a Stranger is Based on This Case

2011-11-27T06:10:00.000-08:00

Brave heart. (heart-and-lung transplant recipient Claire Sylvia)

On May 29, 1988, Claire Sylvia became the recipient of the first heart-and-lung transplant ever done in New England, an operation that saved her life after years of cardiopulmonary disease. The donor--Sylvia was told he was an 18-year-old Maine man killed in a motorcycle accident--had given her a new start. She felt renewed. She felt blessed. She felt like a beer.

Huh? Normally this tea-sipping, New Age modern dancer and teacher hated beer. But in the years that followed her 5 1/2-hour operation at Yale-New Haven Hospital, Sylvia claims, she found herself subject to odd new tastes. The green peppers she once loathed, she now loved. She developed a passion for fried chicken. Strangest of all, she fancied herself acting more confident, more aggressive, more...masculine. Strutting down the street, she felt like John Travolta muscling his way through Saturday Night Fever. In a dream, she says, she saw herself with a mystery man she knew only as Tim L. "We kissed, and as we kissed I inhaled him into me," Sylvia says. The donor's spirit, she came to believe, had merged into hers.

She became convinced when she met the family of the organ donor, whose name turned out to be Tim Lamirande. His family, Sylvia claims, said her new feelings also described their Tim, right down to the chicken nuggets he loved so much that he had a box of them with him when he died. "I said, 'Oh, my God,' " recalls Sylvia, who tells the story in A Change of Heart (Little, Brown), a memoir that has won her bookings on Oprah, Today and 20/20, a big 200,000-copy first printing and a high six-figure paycheck from Disney for the film rights.

Not surprisingly, skepticism abounds. Sylvia attributes her experience to "cellular memory"--a theory that cells carry far more information than has previously been supposed. Conventional doctors and scientists tend to regard the idea as hokum. "I never really agreed with Claire," says Gail Eddy, coordinator of Yale-New Haven's transplant program. "I've never had another patient claim anything like that." Mary Ann Wirtz of the United Network for Organ Sharing says, "We don't know of anyone who has said cellular memory is legitimate."

Still, Sylvia defends her story as tenaciously as she has fought for life since her health problems began when she was a little girl. Born in Manhattan to Army physician William Kropf and high school assistant principal Beatrice, both deceased, Sylvia (who took her middle name as her surname after the second of her two marriages failed in 1983) grew up largely in Mt. Vernon, N.Y. As a child she was beset with a heart murmur and as a young adult with glomerulonephritis, a serious kidney disease. But she still became a professional dancer and spent six years performing. After daughter Amara was born in 1972, Sylvia became a homemaker, dance teacher and drama coach in the Boston suburbs. (She now lives in a Victorian house in Hull, Mass.)

But Sylvia's heart and lungs deteriorated, and in 1983 she was diagnosed with primary pulmonary hypertension, which is usually fatal. Amara, now 25, says that by the mid-80s, her mother "ended up with an oxygen tank and was basically in bed all day."

After the surgery, Sylvia implored the hospital to tell her if her dreams of a Tim L. had any foundation. Eddy, who concedes that Sylvia got that much of the donor's name right, refused to tell her anything, citing hospital policy. "She envisioned a lot of things and possibly may even have read into certain things," Eddy says.

Undaunted, Sylvia unearthed Tim's identity through a newspaper story about his accident--a sleuthing job that she insists she had not begun before she told Eddy about her dreams of Tim L. When she met the donor's family in 1991, they showed her the scene of the accident and his grave, then brought her back to their house. Tim's mother, says Sylvia, "went to the back room, and, I'll never forget, she came walking toward me with this huge sheet cake she had made with the word Welcome on it. It was really very touching."

Since then, Sylvia has been living enough for two souls. Daughter Amara reports that her 56-year-old mother stays out until all hours, often dancing with her live-in beau, contractor Jerry Mulcahy, 58. Although Sylvia claims no medical expertise, she is convinced that her new personality is a direct result of her new heart. "Who knows?" she says. "The heart is not just a pump. It's more than that."

Trusting one's gut reaction

This story is not on the cosmic level of flying saucers but reaches into inner space and the mind-body connection. It's for skeptics and believers, for "E.R." fans and "X-Filers."
A Massachusetts woman, Claire Sylvia, was suffering from primary pulmonary hypertension, a life-threatening illness. In 1988, she became the first New Englander to undergo a heart-and-lung transplant. She was 48.
Her doctors at Yale-New Haven Hospital told her nothing about her organ donor except that he'd died in a motorcycle accident in Maine.

After the operation, Claire began to acquire new tastes and personality traits. She craved chicken nuggets, green peppers and beer. She had so much energy, at 50, she went backpacking around Europe. She also enjoyed an increased libido.
Five months after the operation, she was haunted by a dream in which she kissed a young man named Tim L. "I felt there was a living presence of another person within me," she says in her book, "A Change of Heart." She awoke convinced that Tim L. was her donor.
At the library, she did a search through the Maine obituaries around the time of her transplant operation. A Tim Lamirande from Saco, Maine, 18, died of head injuries in a motorcycle accident. Claire wrote his family and they confirmed he was the donor.
When Claire visited the Lamirandes (not their real name), Tim's mother was shocked by their conversation. "Claire said things we had not talked about with her."
As you might guess, Tim was crazy about chicken nuggets and green peppers. His boundless energy enabled him to hold down three jobs at once.
Claire Sylvia, a retired teacher and dancer, is not a likely con artist. She speaks softly and has no interest in converting anyone to anything. She says simply that she "doesn't have a theory for this."
Of course, she could be a fraud, just cashing in on a book deal and the talk show circuit. Or there could be other explanations. For instance, organ recipients often experience post-transplant changes.
Last year I wrote a piece on "gut feelings" and the fact that researchers are now saying the body has two brains, one in the skull and one in the gut. A report in The New York Times inspired the column.
Scientists are surprised to find that the gut contains more than 100 million neurons. Messages between neurons in this gut-brain are zapped back and forth and the complex circuitry enables it to act independently, learn, remember and produce "gut" feelings.
The two brains, connected by a vagus nerve, can speak to each other (if they wish). Most important, this gut-brain is only loosely connected to the head brain and can function alone, say scientists in this new field of neurogastroenterology.
Now I ask you, if the lowly gut can think, what can the lofty heart do? Does the heart have a memory? Can it think? (Ask someone with a broken heart.)
If the lowly stomach is smart enough to think and act independently of the brain, might the heart have a whole secret life we know nothing about?
How big a leap is it from Tim's heart to Claire's soul? Can Tim's heart retain memory in Claire? Can it remember chicken nuggets and green peppers?
Though we can't verify Claire Sylvia's story in full, two things we know for certain: The mind-body connection is mysterious and profound, and we know almost nothing about it. Also, not so long ago, the American Medical Association said, incredibly, there is no connection between mind and body at all.

Claire Sylvia Photo

2009-05-01T05:04:00.000-07:00

Heart of a Stranger movie

Heart of a Stranger Movie (true story)

Heart of a Stranger is Based on This Case

Claire Sylvia Photo