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.
Jim wrote and produced an award-winning documentary about his transplant and the family who made it possible.
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