Christopher Scott’s heart stopped beating for almost 10 hours.

That’s how long he was on the operating table, hooked up to a heart-lung machine that took over for those organs while doctors performed a rare life-saving surgery on his ravaged heart, in a procedure so unusual the technique is nicknamed the UFO. His was the worst case the senior surgeon had seen in his 30-year career.

One night last March, Scott was rushed by ambulance to the Peter Munk Cardiac Centre with a raging infection picked up from a kidney dialysis line, which had spread to his heart.

Unable to breathe without tubes, he was placed in a medically induced coma.

Doctors tried to prepare his parents, Susan and Gord, for the worst.

“They told us he was dying,” recalls Susan. “We thought we were going to lose our son,” she said, her eyes watering at the memory.

Dr. Mitesh Badiwala, a 37-year-old cardiac surgeon, was on call that night and rushed Scott into the operating room. Two of his heart valves were so damaged they were leaking, causing blood to flow backwards into his lungs and shutting down blood flow to his major organs.

“We had to do something,” said Badiwala. “He basically was drowning.”

When Badiwala opened up his patient, he saw things were even worse than he had expected.

Two of the four valves in Scott’s heart were completely eaten away by the infection. Worse, even the area connecting the two was destroyed.

“Every time we tried to hold the valves, they basically fell apart,” Badiwala said.

Usually surgeons would put in an artificial or mechanical valve, but they need the tissue in between to sew the new valves into. Without it, Scott would be left with a gaping hole, right in the centre of his heart.

But the younger surgeon knew there was someone in the building capable of saving Scott’s life.

Dr. Chris ​​​Feindel, a cardiac surgeon the Scotts say had been nicknamed “God” by hospital staff for his superhuman scalpel skill, had done the UFO before. But even he had never seen such a bad case.

“My first reaction was, 'this poor guy’s not going to survive this no matter what we do',” he said, calling the damage “spectacular.”

“I was surprised, even myself, that we got him through.”

It’s not an operation done in most hospitals, Feindel said. “To be honest, a lot of these patients won’t even get referred to surgery, because people basically give up on them.”

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The room was silent, but for the surgeon’s voices and the sounds of the machines. Unlike some younger doctors, Feindel prefers to work without music, adrenaline providing enough of a rhythm.

Over 10 hours, he led the team through the intense UFO surgery, known in the U.S. as a “commando operation,” cutting out the infected valves and rebuilding the heart.

Using lining from a cow’s heart, he constructed a patch into which he sewed two mechanical valves, saving Scott’s life.

Scott spent four months in hospital, undergoing five surgeries in all, including one to remove an ulcer he got from the stress.

“It’s been a slow recovery. It took a while for me to even start walking up the stairs again, just because I was in the bed for so long,” Scott said.

He’s currently off work on long-term disability from his job in underground construction with Toronto Water. He hasn’t been able to return to his pre-surgery gym routine.

“But it seems like it’s going pretty good now,” he said.

The Scotts have a quiet holiday season planned: hanging around the house, a family meal. Their stockings, including Christopher’s, with his name stitched across the top, are already hung across the mantel.

But after what they’ve been through, it’s not something they take for granted.

“We’re grateful that he’s still sitting here,” Susan said. “Everyone kept saying, ‘he’s a miracle.’ Everybody was in awe of this.

“It was almost like everything fell into place that way. It’s like the universe was protecting us.”