Montaigne Medal Finalist · Pacific Book Review Notable Book · Kirkus Reviews · Featured in USA Today & Reader's Digest
At seventeen, Jim Stavis was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes and told he'd be lucky to see fifty. He built a steel company instead.
Then his kidneys failed. Then his heart. At forty-two, a heart attack in the San Bernardino Mountains — CPR for over twenty minutes, an artery ninety-five percent blocked. When doctors told him he needed a heart, a kidney, and a pancreas, they said the surgery had never been done.
He told them he'd be the first. He was. He is seventy-one years old.
This is the story of what that actually costs — and of Brice, a seventeen-year-old football kicker whose heart now beats in Jim's chest, and whose mother still leans in to listen to it.
In this revised edition, Jim also shares the years he spent caring for his wife, Renee, through cancer—and what hope meant after loss.
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Audiobook also available on Authors Insight.
For more about Jim's incredible story, visit JimStavis.com »
Jim wrote and produced an award-winning documentary about his transplant and the family who made it possible.
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