Seven Pounds and Will Smith’s Eyes
OK, if you haven’t seen ‘Seven Pounds’ yet then grab your box of tissues and head out. Certainly don’t read the rest of this post, because it contains spoilers.Quite apart from the fact that if you didn’t know the plot you’d be lost until about the last ten minutes, since its premise is so strongly ‘medical’, the writers might have tried a little harder, and perhaps not sacrificed quite so much realism in the name of art.
As far as I know, you can’t donate ‘lobes of lungs’ to help your brother’s lung cancer treatment. You can however donate parts of your liver, a kidney, and bone marrow. Bone marrow donation is indeed quite unpleasant, and usually involves a general anaesthetic for the donor. In an adult donor you’d normally have to harvest form several sites to get enough decent marrow cells.
While it would be nice to think that Smith’s character was able to find out others’ tissues types (or even their blood groups) from their IRS records, this seems unlikely.
Finally, there’s the Woody Harrelson character, the blind piano-playing call centre operator. Unfortunately the only part of the eyes that can be transplanted are the corneas – the crystal clear window in front of the pupil and coloured iris. So I’m afraid Woody would not take on the colour of Will’s eyes after the operation – he’d have the same colour irises that he was born with.
It’s really tedious being a doctor sometimes – if I hadn’t been whingeing about these inconsistencies so much I’m sure I’d have enjoyed the film better.
