GEORGE TOWN, Sept 15 – It was an emotional moment for a Penang couple who finally got to meet the recipient of their deceased daughter’s heart, two years after she died. Mark Kok Wah and his wife Ariess Tan, have been yearning to hear their late daughter’s heartbeat after she died and her heart was donated to a Singaporean recipient.
The couple also described that the meeting with Serene Lee Shu Lynn, 37, at the Penang Chief Minister Lim Guan Eng’s office in Komtar today as a dream come true. The couple donated the heart of their only child, Carmen Mark, 18, who had succumbed to an arterial rupture in her brain and fell into a coma in July 2015.
“My daughter is still around, my daughter is still surviving, I can feel she is still here, she’s not 100 per cent gone, I am fully delighted to finally hear my daughter’s heart beat after two years,” he said during a press conference with Chief Minister Lim Guan Eng at Komtar earlier today.
Mark said the reason why he wanted this meeting with Lee to be publicised as he wanted to spread the message to others that organ donation is a blessing to both sides, the donors and the recipients and also to change the mindset that organ donation is taboo. He said there is a taboo against organ donation and something must be done to get rid of this taboo
“When I decided to donate my daughter’s organs, my mother was against the move. I don’t blame her, it is a taboo for most of us, and my mother loves her the most because my daughter was her precious grandchild. Besides that, I hopes the meeting with Serene would help change that perception,” he said.
Before her death, Carmen was studying nursing at the Nanyang Polytechnic in Singapore. She suffered an arterial rupture and fell into a coma in July 2015. She died three weeks later. Lee said after the heart transplant, she had wanted to meet her donor’s family and thank them for the gift of life they had given her.
Mark said he and his wife had been yearning to listen to their daughter’s heartbeat and thanked Serene for fulfilling their wish. Serene who hails from Singapore, said she was also eager to meet Mark and his wife. She said she followed them on Facebook and finally took a lot of courage for her to connect them, whom she addressed as Daddy Mark and Mummy Ariess.
“After seeing their posting on Facebook that they wanted to travelling 14,000 miles here just to hear the heartbeat, I felt sad and said to myself that I should personally thank them and let them listen to their daughter’s heartbeat. I will fly here to them,” she said, adding that contacted Mark in August and arranged the meeting today.
Tomorrow, Lee, along with Kok Wah and Tan, will visit the location where Carmen’s ashes were scattered into the sea near the Penang Second Bridge. On Sunday, she will join the couple at the “Give of Life” organ donation programme in Penang. On Monday, she will visit Carmen’s alma mater, Penang Chinese Girls’ School, before she leaves for Singapore.
Lim praised Carmen’s family members for their efforts to promote organ donation to save lives. Lee, a mother of three children, suffered from dilated cardiomyopathy, a disease of the heart muscle and relied on a mechanical pump that ran on external batteries to keep her heart pumping properly. — PN
