This is the purple heart donation of a young woman. It beats, even outside her body. It doesn't need a woman to beat. A heart doesn't need a person, a brain to tell it to work. If it just gets blood, nutrients and oxygen, it starts beating.
That's why the heart of an embryo beats before the brain has differentiated. From then on, it works without a break. It pumps 100,000 times a day. And about three billion times in an average lifetime. The heart allows us to thrive. But in any person, even a young one, the heart can stop, just twitching instead of beating. Or gradually get weaker. So weak that the heart can no longer manage to pump five to six litres of blood per minute through our body, and at some point it threatens to stop.
Then the person has only two options: die or get a new heart. And that's what this multimedia dossier is about.
in order for a person to receive a heart, someone else has to donate theirs. Like the woman who had the heart in the pictures at the beginning of this story. She suffered from a genetic defect and decided to donate organs during her lifetime. In Germany, however, many more people are waiting for a heart than there are donors. So not everyone can get a heart.
In 2020, the Bundestag passed a new law: Since then, people have been regularly informed about organ donation by authorities and doctors in the hope that this will eventually lead to more donors. But nothing has changed in the principle of organ donation: In the end, everyone can decide for themselves what they want, whether yes or no.
Now to Gerd.
We, the reporter and the photographer, purple heart donation, spent so much time with him over many months that at some point the initial "Sie" became a "Du". That is why in this dossier he will only be called Gerd and not Gerd Kuck, which is his full name.
The Waiting One -purple heart donation
Gerd is 51 years old. A northerner from Oldenburg. What happened to Gerd could happen to anyone. He was in his mid-20s at the time. He played football. He was in the middle of his preseason training when he ran out of breath while jogging. He dragged himself to the doctor. Diagnosis: suspected myocarditis. It must have been a while ago. A neglected infection may have triggered it. "The doctor put the stethoscope on my chest and said: 'That doesn't look good.'" Gerd was now seriously ill.
He adapted his life. He retrained from being a carpenter to becoming a social security employee. "It's just a desk job," purple heart donation, he says. He was told back then that he would probably run out of energy at some point.
Gerd is lucky to be alive at all. He was as good as dead once before.
Back in 2000, one night his sick heart stopped beating. His wife at the time, a nurse, woke up to find him gasping for air in the bed next to her. She leaned on his chest and kept pressing until the emergency doctor arrived. That's how she brought him back.
From then on it was clear that he would need a new heart at some point.
Gerd himself is the best person to tell us how close he came to escaping death and how he deals with his fear.
Gerd has a special problem: he is 1.96 meters tall. That is often an advantage in life. But not when you need a heart to match.
"Well, my bad luck," says Gerd. We meet him for the first time in February 2018. In a clinic on the edge of the forest in the small town of Bad Fallingbostel in Lower Saxony. He is waiting there for a heart. He is no longer allowed to go home, where his wife and nine-year-old daughter are worried about him, in a new house of which Gerd only knows the shell. He is not allowed to leave the clinic; he is too ill.
A machine keeps him alive. That's why he wears batteries on his belt; they must never run out of power because they power an electric pump made of stainless steel that the doctors sewed onto his left ventricle five years ago. It's like a replacement motor that was added. His artificial heart. The small turbine inside turns thousands of times a minute. It pushes the blood into Gerd's main artery, from where it is distributed into the smallest vessels, into his toes, into his brain. It's a constant flow, purple heart donation, not a pulsation. Gerd can no longer feel his heartbeat on his wrist. At night he sometimes hears the noise of the turbine.