Thread: Gods

Dear Colleagues, as some of you may know I work as a cardiac anaesthetist and this post is due to my attending to the Lukasz Palkowski movie - GODS. The whole story is about the father of Polish cardiac transplant medicine, prof Zbigniew Religa who I had a chance to meet few times but has been working with his disciples for the last 20 years, cardiac surgeons and my fellows anaesthetists, giving anaesthesia to his patients. I have had constant chats with many of them and this intriguing story of the cardiac surgeon driven by a passion, paying with his life to rescue people and suffering from cigarettes smoking, drunk many times and bad tempered however giving himself totally to the idea is a fascinating thing and I am pretty sure you will not be disappointed.

Perhaps many of you may not be aware of the fact that only two years after the first heart transplant by prof. Barnard our Polish surgeon Jan Moll took a chance to do the same thing in 1969. The movie concentrates on the difficult times when Mr Religa started his plan to create a new department of cardiac surgery in the south of Poland, in Silesian city Zabrze to make heart transplants a routine procedure in Polish medicine. He fought for the money and acknowledgment in hard communist times, when there was no money, nor common knowledge of this new type of operation.

Tomasz Kot, actor playing Religa in the movie, did an excellent job but not only him, the rest of the staff, music and way the story is told prevent you definitely from eating your popcorn, take my word !

GODS by Lukasz Palkowski opens the 26th PFFA | Polish Film Festival in America