“When I woke up there was some pretty bad pain immediately,” Sasha said after the three-hour operation. “I felt surprisingly lucid but I was extremely exhausted.” Here, he rests in his hotel room with an icepack on his chest after surgery on Nov. 23, 2020, in Kansas City, Kansas. Sasha, who said he was dehydrated for the remainder of the day due to intubation, continuously drank water and apple juice through a straw.