When Hope is your Only Option

One man’s brave journey, through life’s adversity.

Jim Stavis was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes at 17. Decades later, his heart, kidney, and pancreas were failing. His team at Cedars-Sinai told him a triple-organ transplant had never been attempted, and Jim said yes anyway.

That transplant is only part of the story. Before it, Jim survived four separate near-death incidents and built two companies from the ground up. After it, he spent twenty years building a relationship with the family of the sixteen-year-old donor who saved his life. And in 2024, he became a caregiver himself when his wife Renee was diagnosed with a terminal illness. Her self-written eulogy, tracing her resilience back to her father’s survival of the Holocaust, is reproduced in full in this newly revised edition.

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