Minutes later, while the surgeons and their team calmly began the procedure, all of our eyes popped open above our face masks as we saw it: George’s heart. It was glistening and red and beating rhythmically inside his open chest cavity. It would not have surprised me if any of us had become queasy at that moment, but the entire scene was so fascinating, we could hardly take our eyes off of it. As our cameras rolled and we nearly gasped, Dr. Robertson cupped the heart in his gloved hand to make sure we got a clear look. Everything keeping George Justice alive at that moment was in the doctor’s hand.

Though she had been involved in thousands of heart surgeries before, Dr. Magliato talked us through the procedure with the same excitement and awe that we were feeling seeing one for the first time. We were amazed at how calmly she and her colleagues were conducting such life and death work – there were no agitated requests for instruments, no raised voices, no tension like we were used to seeing in TV medical shows. Nearly two hours had passed when, at the doctors’ direction, George’s heart took its last few quivers and then stopped. As it lay there lifeless, it was hard to comprehend that George was not dead at that moment – instead, his blood was being circulated through his body by the cardiopulmonary bypass machine nearby.

Two hours later, after Doctors Magliato and Robertson had repaired the blocked arteries, George’s heart was beating on its own again. It took both doctors’ strength to physically pull together George’s rib cage, and the speed and precision with which they sewed up his chest was an impressive display of both surgical skill and needlework. While our production team was exhilarated by the process, the surgeons, their scrub nurses and the rest of the OR team appeared to have barely broken a sweat. It’s all in a day’s work, apparently, when your job is saving lives and repairing broken hearts.

After surgery, George was whisked to the intensive care unit, where he would recover with his fiancée at his bedside. We couldn’t wait to come back the next day to interview George and tell him everything we’d seen – well, maybe not everything.