| Will I still Love My Mum? |
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Will I Still Love My Mum? Channel 4 @ 9pm on Wednesday 3 AugustThat’s one of the first questions a child asks when they’re told they need a heart and lung transplant. Children with Cystic Fibrosis already know they have an illness that cannot be cured and that will eventually kill them.When the drugs stop working the only thing left is to go on a waiting list for a transplant. But half of those who go on the list die while waiting. And two out of every five who do get a transplant will die within five years. Imagine being ten years old and having to weigh up the risks against the benefits of a transplant. And then imagine being that child’s parents and knowing that if your child says “no” to a transplant, the potentially life saving operation will not go ahead.
As Hannah’s father says: “It takes every part of being a parent away from you… It’s a hard thing to get your head around, to think that a ten-year-old girl can say to surgeons ‘No, I don’t want it,’ and walk out of the hospital, and me and her mother are left there knowing, if she doesn’t have the operation, well we know the end result.” The decision whether to go on the transplant list is proving a particularly difficult one for Hannah. She is terrified of the procedure and Kayley is concerned about how many patients actually return from the operating theatre alive. Many children are unsure about having somebody else’s organs in their own body, and often ask how they will feel if they have another child’s lungs or hearts. Many of them are still young enough to ask: “If I have someone else’s heart, will I still love my mum?” Press contact: Rachel Furst, 0161 903 8082; Picture publicity: tbc Exec Prod: Stuart Prebble Prod/ Dir: Eamon T. O’Connor Prod Co: Liberty Bell Comm ed: Katie Speight |
Will I Still Love My Mum? follows
ten-year-olds Hannah and Kayley as they weigh up whether to go on the transplant
list. Both were diagnosed with
Cystic Fibrosis as babies and they’ve fought against the disease all their
lives. CF is the UK’s most common
inherited life-threatening disease. It
clogs the lungs and digestive system with sticky mucus, making it difficult to
breathe or digest food. Both girls
are now running out of time and are near the point at which the drugs will no
longer work. But even if they do decide
to go on the transplant list, they face an agonising wait for a suitable donor.
Even if they’re called, there is no guarantee that the eight-hour
operation will be a success. And they must come to terms with the fact that, for
them to survive, another young person has to have died.
A successful transplant can
bring a quality of life unimaginable to a patient suffering from CF, for whom
life can be extremely stark: Hannah can hardly get into her bunk bed by herself. Both she and Kayley must take a huge amount of medication, face daily
painful, physiotherapy sessions, and are unable to live anything approaching a
normal life. They quickly get out
of breath after walking short distances. They
and their parents are only too aware that it’s only a matter of time before
the girls will die.
But the medical establishment believes ten-year-olds should have the right to
make the decision to go on the transplant list, which can result in a harrowing
situation for parents: if their child is too frightened to have the operation,
the parents can’t over-rule them.
