Dr. Mich Shaeffer hasn't been home to Ottumwa, Iowa, since July.
The Iowa urologist says on July 27, after a full day in his office seeing patients and doing surgery, he got home and felt chest pains. He told his wife he was having a heart attack.
Shaeffer was flown from a Des Moines Hospital to Nebraska Medicine, where he was critically ill. His lungs, kidneys, liver and heart had all failed.
Modern medicine kept hm alive, including two LVADs, an implanted mechanical heart that helped Dr. Shaeffer's organs heal while he waited for a transplant.
While waiting for a transplant, he says he had many near death experiences. The staff in the ICU nicknamed him "Miracle Man," and with five hours left on the donor list and a 1-in-100,000 chance to live, Dr. Shaeffer got word he had a donor heart.
"I knew after that God had a purpose for me," he said, "he wasn't letting me go."
And that purpose, after his family and friends, is to share his story, one of a self-professed workaholic, type A doctor with a new outlook on life.
"There's another way to go about living your life, treating people just as kind as possible, helping people in some different way than I did before, and I don't know what that is but I'm going to do it."
