MESSAGE FROM LATV FOUNDER: GREG GROSZ
Ever
since I first discovered that my liver lab values were deteriorating and I
began my transplant journey I realized how much my wife, other transplant
patients and spouses, and I wanted to talk to other people who had been through
the experience. We searched the Internet and found lots of charts, graphs,
and clinical data, but very little information of a personal nature. We wanted
most to talk to people who had “Been there. Done that”.
For more than 30 years I have been a documentary film director and editor,
a professional communicator if you will, and have learned to watch people
and situations unfold and then tell a story that other people have not had
the opportunity to experience. With the eyes of a storyteller I watched my
own tale unfold.
Ultimately a donor who I never met gave me the Gift of Life. I felt the unstoppable
urge to use the gifts, talents, and blessings with which I have been bestowed
to help people who found them in my situation. Transplant Central is the result.
Nearly 30 years ago my filmmaking talents fused with medical subjects. While
a graduate film student at the University of Southern California I was hired
away from the USC Annenberg School of Communication to be Media Director for
the School of Pharmacy’s brand new video studio. One of my first productions,
Metro Quiz Metro Quiz, won a Health Sciences Communications Association
award.
After forming LATV I made You Have Got The Power, a documentary about
bone cancer amputees. One of the subjects of the documentary was a truck driver
named Cody, who had separated from his wife largely because of his feelings
about being “less than a man” and not communicating with her.
His wife attended one of the screenings of Power with him, where
she heard him reveal in our documentary all the things that he had never told
her in person. After the screening, both of them in tears, they embraced and
have been together ever since. In this I saw for myself the power of communicating
when people are in medical need.
Power won the prestigious John Muir Medical Film Festival award,
which was presented to me by pioneering heart surgeon Dr. Michael DeBakey,
and film legend, Helen Hayes. Once again my filmmaking abilities merged with
medicine. Ironically, 20 years after receiving this award I had my own surgery,
the first chapter in my own medical story, and the beginning of Transplant
Central.
Transplant
Central - LATV | ||||||