Hello, My name is Shaver and I just watched an episode of "Surgery saved my life" dealing with a pediatric heart patient and a teen patient. While their stories are harrowing I am still looking at surgeries for the rest of my life.

I WILL BE IN MY 5th OPEN HEART SURGERY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON REGIONAL HEART CENTER WITHIN THE NEXT TWO WEEKS.

My heart was malformed from birth and did not pump oxygenated blood to my body. I was born in 1973 and back then they didn't operate on infants, they just closed them up and hoped they would live a couple of years till they were large enough for the surgeons to handle.

I was one of the first lucky ones to have this kind of procedure at the hands of Seattle Children's Hospital's Dr. Savage.

The diagnosis at the time (1975) was that I was a Tetrology of fallot with complications. When they opened me up the rest of the team were certain that I would not make it through the surgery, but Savage was the lead and he went through 2 to 3 surgical teams with an 18 hour surgery. When I made it through and started to get better he REFUSED to charge my parents a dime for the surgery as he said there was no way I should have made it and he thought some higher power had intervened. I am personally an agnostic, but am moved to this day by his kindness.

Fast forward to high school. I had my first Ventricular Tachacardia (arythmia involving the lower chabers of the heart. This is the most serious of the Arhythmias and you can drop dead at any moment. I was rushed to the local hospital and the airlifted to children's orthopedic for a week of monitoring. After that we thought it just might have been a freak occurance.

To date I have had countless V-Tach episodes which finally required them to implant an AICD (automated internal cardiac defibrillator). The first of these devices malfunctioned and broke one of the leads of in my heart after jolting me 10 - 15 times at full power! I cannot explain the pain. What is worse that that is before I had the internal I was defibrillated with the extenal er paddles while fully awake and unmedicated. Talk about pain.

Anyway I am trying to get through college and the cardiologist breaks the news to mw that I have to go in for a very risky repair. They take me to the Spokane Deaconess Medical center in 1997 and unsuccessfully try a few catherder oblations and a homograft pulmonic valve with a pulmonary artery to be seperately joined. They did an ok job, but failed to fix the issue.

In 1997 I hav just come home from what turned out to be my last semester of college and had a massive V-Tach which led me on one way ticket to the UW med center. They broke the news to me that I would have to have another (3rd) open heart. We went ahead and during the procedure my left lung collapsed providing extreme recovery difficulties (I had to stay in the ICU longer than usual with a breathing tube rammed down my throat) and was in the hospital for a month before they would release be to go home.

10 months later I start gurgling when I breath and it took 4 seperate visits and my refusal to leave until they had a positive diagnosis which prompted them to send me to nuclear medicine which found the left lung (again) was clotted. The medical term is Pulmonary Embolis. I went through 9 1/2 weeks of non treatment to a condition that could have killed me at any moment. The embolis can break off and travel to the brain triggering a massive stroke or to the heart ending with a fatal myocardial infarction.

So here we are 10 months after my 3rd open heart (with countless other surgeries) with them telling me that they don't feel comfortable letting me leave the hospital because they need to operate on the heart valve and artery yet again. This was, of course, preceeded by another V-Tach and paddle defibrillation.

As if the third isn't painfull enough the surgery had left me with an infected chest so they had to re-operate and debreed the entire chest of pus and necrotic tissue. I had a very challenging recovery which took another month in the hospital and several months at home because I was so weak.

That was the 4th open heart and on my recent checkup, they saw that the valve (Pulmonic Valveand pulmonary artery were failing and the artery itself was in a difficul stenosis (narrowing and twisting of the artery itself which creats less oxegen sent to the lungs due to the inefficientcy of the badly twisted Pulmonic Valve. This leads to massive back pressure buildup in the Right Ventrical which is also pushing on the lungs and aggravating the stenosised valve.

In addition to this they told me they had to get this operated on as soon as possible, but that the risks are much higher with all of the previous open hearts and scar material that I have and still do have. They have to BUILD an artery to make sure it won't be so short as to stenosis to such a great degree, but they don't know yet where they are going to find the material due to all of the scar damage from all of the previous surgeries and oblations.

Needless to say I am scared out of my mind and am in a completely different situation than any of the others. I now have a wife a son (7 years), a daughter (2 1/2 years), and an infant (3 1/2 months old). They are having a hard time of itdue to the sudden neccesity of this much more risky Open Heart.

I wanted to share this with the discovery channel in case they would be interested in filming the surgery. If something goes wrong at least they will be able to get to know what kind of person I was and that I wanted to be there for them. I just cannot comprehend denying my children a father and my wife the rest of our lives together.

I want to live and am very strong mentally going into this surgery (any little bit of mind over matter helps).

I think this would make a really COMPELLING story of what some lifelong Congestive Heart Patients and their individual heart parts have to endure just to be able to walk a block.

It could also give those about to have similar procedures hope and steer them through their surgeries.

The selfish part of this request is that I would like to have the procedure on film for me to review or for my children to view and find out how hard I fought to stay around for them.

I have had a plethora of other emergency surgeries and procedures as mentioned above which also complicate this open heart.

I challenge anyone to a scar contest as I haven't lost one yet.

Please consider calling me to talk more in depth about this idea and quickly as I will be finding out this post superbowl week what the exact date is for the surgery in the next two weeks.

I appreciate and thank you for your time and efforts in this matter.

Love

Christopher Lewis Shaver

You can find me through the members section of the discovery website. My site name is shaverbgod and you should have access to the e-mail address. If not you can reach me at yahoo.com with the same user name.

Thanks again, and I look forward to hearing from you.