"65_RedRoses" is a biography of a young woman with cystic fibrosis

“65_RedRoses” is a user name, but it is also a film biography and medical journey of a young woman with cystic fibrosis.  The film takes the viewer through daily life, which ranges from some normal activity to horrific coughing and suffocation spells, through lung transplant surgery, about a year of normal and active life, and then the downslide of organ rejection.

  

The film also explores the online friendships of the young British Columbia woman, Eva Markvoort, whose family lives in New Westminster, near Vancouver.  I believe that I stayed one night in that town when on a Christmas vacation trip with some graduate students in December 1966. 

  

I was surprised at her online access in the hospital. I’ve been led to believe that cell phone service and Internet access is normally not available to someone in the hospital, although it should be if paid for.

The film shows the surgery graphically, and describes the new lungs as slightly discolored from pollution and perhaps cigarette smoking.  They are not perfect.  There occurs a moral question about whether people have a moral obligation to take care of themselves well enough so that their organs are reusable.  Of course, gay men are still banned from donating, and that point has been made into a “moral” argument in Russia.

The film, from Four Force, is directed by Philip Lyall and Nimisha Mukerji.

  

The best link to give is the live journal from Eva, here..The film is listed as released in 2009 but the Netflix video covers her passing in March 2010.  Her final decline was very quick.

Wikipedia attribution link for Vancouver picture. 

Update: Nov. 28

ABC News reported on the lung transplant for Lindsey McLaughlin here.  The donor was a young man who died in a freak but tragic fall in a subway station in NYC.