About Jim

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About the Author

In 1971, Jim Stavis was seventeen years old and had just been diagnosed with juvenile type 1 diabetes. The prognosis was specific: kidney failure, heart disease, blindness, amputation. He would be lucky to see fifty.

He went to UCLA. At twenty-two he founded an automotive parts distributor. In 1988 he co-founded Paragon Steel with his friend Doug Carpenter, running it out of an office above a pub in Long Beach with four employees. Thirty-eight years later the company is still going, and the steel pods overlooking the ocean at Tongva Park in Santa Monica are theirs, and so are many of the canopies at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Meanwhile his body was doing exactly what the doctors said it would. Dialysis three days a week before he was fifty. A heart attack on a ropes course at forty-two, brought back by a friend who had known him since junior high. Then congestive heart failure. Then his kidneys.

Before a transplant evaluation, a hospital social worker asked him a question: “What is your source of hope?”

His cardiologist at Cedars-Sinai told him he needed a heart, a kidney, and a pancreas. The combined procedure had essentially no precedent. Jim said: “Then I'll be the first.”

On November 3, 2005, he went into surgery. Twenty hours later he had a new heart and a new kidney. The pancreas came the following October. He remains the only triple-transplant recipient in Cedars-Sinai's history.

His donor was Brice Fabing, a seventeen-year-old football kicker at Lompoc High School. On the evening of October 31, 2005, Brice had just kicked a forty-five-yard field goal and was planning a fifty-five-yarder for the following week. He was killed in a car accident driving home from practice. His family donated his organs.

Most transplant recipients never meet their donor's family. Jim and the Fabings walk together every year in the Donate Life California 5K. At their first meeting, Brice's mother Dorine put her head on Jim's chest to hear her son's heartbeat. A photograph of Brice hangs in Jim's kitchen.

In 2014 Jim lost Doug Carpenter, his business partner of twenty-five years, to an infection. He rebuilt the company around the loss.

He is seventy-one years old. He was told he would be lucky to see fifty.