Black Heart Health a Focus of New Documentary

Donnie Seals Sr. says he was dead — flatlined on the operating table as he was being prepared for his third open-heart surgery. Doctors brought him back to life.

"I'm not going out like this," he thought to himself afterwards. "I'd rather go out exercising and being healthy than going downhill with more and more medications."

And so began his journey to health, a quest over nearly 30 years, that would spur him to reduce his daily heart medications from 20 to just one, overhaul his diet, spark a passion for bike riding and eventually take the 70-year-old Seals from St. Louis, Missouri, to his home outside Chicago over the course of a four-day, 350-mile biking adventure with his son Eric.

Lucky for us, Eric and his brother Donnie Seals Jr. are filmmakers, who document the preparations and the ride in a way that's engaging and immersive

"Bike Vessel," premiering on PBS's Independent Lens on Feb. 24, is meant to invoke Donnie's obstructed blood vessels, but also, according to Eric, "a vessel is something that will get you [what] you're looking to achieve. And so, my dad's vessel was his bike. That's how [my brother] came up with the title 'Bike Vessel'."

I spoke with Eric and his father by Zoom earlier this month, and the love and ease of their relationship was fun to see.

The structure of the film is familiar to those of us who love documentaries. There's a countdown to the ride, beginning about four months out, at the start of intensive training. The four days of the journey are the culmination of this timeline, and bike enthusiasts will note that two of the days are "centuries," meaning they cover more than 100 miles.

On a longer timeline, we also revisit Seals' three open-heart surgeries, and glimpse home movies from his early family life, showing his smoking and drinking and convivial sharing with friends and family of the fatty, salty, sugary foods that helped compromise his heart.

For the two brothers, sharing their father's lifesaving health transformation was also an opportunity to make a larger statement. Along with coproducer Resita Cox, they decided that their film should shine a light on how racism and societal disadvantages have an impact on heart disease suffered by Black men. For this thread, the filmmakers call on three health professionals, including Medell Briggs-Malonson, M.D., chief of Health Equity and Inclusive Excellence at UCLA Health.

"One thing we know," Briggs-Malonson says, "is that our biology is 99.9% the same." Meaning, of course, that there's nothing baked in to being a person of color that would automatically lead to bad heart health outcomes.

She emphasizes three points in her onscreen interviews for "Bike Vessel," including the effects of stress on the heart, the challenges of communication between people of color and health professionals, and the many ramifications of poor diet, dating back to the period when Black people were enslaved in the United States. In her work, she also focuses on solutions to these problems.

At early screenings, Seals recalls experiencing "the elephant in the room," what he calls "the racial component" of the film his sons have made. He doesn't want that overemphasized. For example, recalling being treated dismissively by one of his surgeons, he tells me, "I wasn't looking at it as I'm being treated like this because I'm a Black man; I wasn't being treated how I felt I should be treated. For example, [after] my first open heart surgery, I complained about something's wrong. And I kept getting answers like 'that's post-surgical pain.' ... And one of the doctors made a comment and my wife was taken aback. He told us, 'We opened you up like a chicken. What do you expect?'"

That kind of dismissive treatment, with two more drastic surgeries to come, led Seals to the Mayo Clinic and to doctors who treated him more humanely.

"Was there a racial component to it? Maybe," he concludes. "But I didn't care. I just wasn't being treated how I felt I should be treated."

Not able to return to work in the midst of multiple health crises, Seals was forced to leave his job and take disability. Difficult as this period was, he now had no choice but to focus on changing his lifestyle. Walking 3 miles to the nearest bike shop, he was shocked at the price of bicycles he was shown, but forked over several thousand dollars because of how important he felt it was to start exercising. His first trips? A quarter mile around the block, which left him gasping, muscles burning. Decades later, his average daily ride is now about 30 miles.

For the film, the bike training and four-day trip are captured by nearly a dozen cameras, including GoPros and a drone. Viewers are always right in the middle of the action. Several animated sequences reveal parts of Seals' life that couldn't be captured by cameras, like the pressure cooker feeling of being the only person of color at work, and his first heart attack on a golf course.

And like any good documentary, it keeps the energy going through conflict, setbacks, small victories and a satisfying conclusion.

Father and son, although loving each other unequivocally, squabble constantly. The biggest argument occurs in training, when Eric takes the lead position, protecting his dad from the wind, and allowing Donnie Sr. to "draft" just behind him. (You see this strategy among teams in the Tour de France.) It's no wonder Eric rebels once his dad moves out in front with newfound energy, leaving Eric struggling far behind, wanting to cuss his dad out.

Donnie is glad that part made it into the film. "That was all my fault, or a lot of it was," he tells me. "But that's when we became a team. That's when we became very, very close."

The closeness is tested multiple times on the four-day trip, but the men never falter. In some ways, the biggest obstacle is not the grueling pace, but their arrival home on day four, as they hit Lake Michigan and ride through the beckoning odors of a hundred family barbecues. It's a reminder of what Donnie has given up, but a bright beacon of what he's gained, as he and Eric complete their journey, and family and friends welcome the men home.

As the film ends, Stanley K. Frencher Jr., a UCLA urologist, distills one key message: "There is no perfect time to start focusing on your health," he says, "and there's never too late a time to start."

Steve Mencher Steve Mencher lives with his wife in a 15-minute community in Baltimore. He is a writer and multimedia producer who has developed stories, films, podcasts and websites for the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, the Defense Department and AARP. He’s the founding producer of "Living Downstream: The Environmental Justice Podcast." Early in his career, he worked for NPR and Carnegie Hall. Read More