“The doctor said it had never been done. He said, ‘I’ll be the first.’”
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Synopsis
Facing Adversity Head On
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.
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WATCH HIS STORY
Source of Hope
Jim wrote and produced an award-winning documentary about his transplant and the family who made it possible.
Triple Transplant Patient Defies Early Prognosis
When Jim Stavis was 17, he was told he'd be lucky to live past his 50th birthday. At that time, he was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. Doctors expected him to be plagued by kidney and heart disease, blindness and amputation before succumbing to diabetes at a young age. In December 2017, Stavis—who received three transplants at Cedars-Sinai—celebrated his 63rd birthday.
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