The touching moment a Missouri woman listened to her brother’s heart beat in a stranger’s chest for the first time, after a chance meeting at a baseball game, has gone viral.
Savannah Roesch posted a video and photographs to Facebook of the moment that fate brought her family together with the man who had received her brother’s heart.
“Today was a day I will never ever forget!” she wrote in her post, which many social media users said moved them to tears.
Roesch, who stresses she is no fan of baseball, had gone to a special game at the St. Louis Cardinals on Transplant Awareness Day on Sunday, April 28 to honor her brother, who had been a heart donor.
She said she had previously exchanged letters with the recipient of her brother’s heart, but was not allowed to include identifying information, other than images of her brother.
When she wore a T-shirt with her brother’s picture to the baseball game on April 28, she had no idea that the recipient was in the crowd.
When a woman approached them as they posed for a photograph and asked, “Are you Donovan’s family?” she just assumed it was a colleague or someone who knew him from school. It wasn’t.
“It was the recipient of Donovan Bulger’s heart!” she wrote. “His daughter recognized the picture on our shirts & told her mom. Without hesitation her mom came up to us & asked because they were just as eager to know who we were just as we were eager to meet them!! We were all in complete shock and awe!”
The man held each of her family in turn as they took turns to listen to his heart.
According to Roesch she had received a letter from the recipient a year earlier. “I wrote back & put some pictures of Donovan along with it so they could put a face to his new heart. In the letters you cannot put any identifying information in them (last name, age, where you live etc.) so it’s such an intense feeling knowing you are so close to contact but really no idea who they are.”
“To finally meet him & his wonderful family completely random, by chance ... that was a feeling I cannot even begin to describe!” she wrote.
“We went back & got a group picture with our new found family!”
“I think Donovan arranged for us to meet this way,” Roesch wrote. “What are the chances of this happening!?”
