"Young at heart" is an expression that literally fits Seah Chiang Nee, Southeast Asia's first heart transplant patient who celebrates the 20th anniversary of his landmark operation last week.
At 65, the Singaporean former newspaper editor has a 37-year-old Australian heart beating inside his stooped frame.
Seah's new lease on life started on Oct. 12, 1985 when surgeons at St. Vincent's Hospital in Sydney removed his failing organ in a five-and-a-half hour operation and replaced it with the heart of a 17-year-old boy who had just died.
Driven by a fervent will to live and with the help of modern medicine, Seah's borrowed time has now lasted two decades, making him the region's longest-surviving heart transplant patient.
"I'll try to live it as a normal day," he insisted in an interview ahead of the 20th anniversary of his landmark surgery.
This means waking up early, taking his usual 30-minute morning walk and spending most of the day polishing his Web site, www.littlespeck.com, an on-line publication containing political views that would not normally see print in the pro-government Singapore media.
"I don't think we're going for a celebration. Maybe just a quiet dinner with my wife," Seah said.
"I think it's so long now that whatever initial charisma [there was] has already been lost. I have tried all these years not to remember that I am a heart transplant patient. I want to live as normal a life as possible so I don't think about that at all."
One milestone Seah can vividly remember is being among billions of people worldwide who welcomed the new millennium -- an event he never imagined he would live to experience.
Seah remembers that after his operation, he was content to be able to live four or five years longer.
So, as he watched the live television countdown at midnight on Dec. 31, 1999, his heart beat increasingly faster.
"I never imagined that I could live through the turn of the century, which to me was an important mark -- you can tell your grandchildren, `I lived through that period,'" he says.
"It was a fantastic feeling that the millennium had changed and I'm still around."
Asked about the next milestone he looks forward to, Seah replies with a sense of realism.
"I am very grateful for what I already have. I'm not a greedy guy," he says.
"At 65, you don't talk of dreams and visions anymore. You talk about hopes, you talk about wishes. Dreams and visions are for younger people -- you've got to be realistic about it."
So what are these hopes and wishes?
"To live through life, see my son graduate and hope that Singapore will prosper. That's my only mission in life -- to make sure that he graduates," Seah says, referring to 25-year-old Pei Kwang, who is enrolled at a US university for a life sciences course.
Does death frighten him now?
"I don't think it frightens me at all. Twenty years is a long, long time and I'm already very grateful," he replies.
It was not always smooth sailing for the extroverted Seah, who in his professional prime reported on the Vietnam war from what was then Saigon, held various foreign postings, ran an independent newspaper in Singapore and travelled throughout the region to cover summits and other assignments.
Before his operation, if it wasn't for a locked window, he would have jumped off the sixth floor of a Singapore hospital to end months of wracking chest pains as his heart slowly weakened due to a viral infection.
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