I used to take it for granted that my husband, Steve, would wake up each morning, his lungs breathing and his heart beating, because that’s what happened each morning, without anybody thinking about it. He was, after all, a Marine and a marathon runner in apparently excellent health. Life changed with the sudden discovery of an “idiopathic” aortic aneurysm in his outwardly perfect body and the subsequent surgery to replace his ascending aorta with Gortex and his irreparably distended aortic valve with a tilting titanium disk that opened and closed with rhythmic clicks. Life changed again 5 years later when a 2mm embolus lodged in a vessel in the right temporal lobe of his brain. Why did these intruders enter our blossoming lives, threatening this deeply loved and needed husband and father? The events occurred with disorienting frequency—stroke, seizure, tests, PICC line, high INR, low INR, loss of consciousness, ICU, tests, seizure, questions, doctors, stroke, tests, and no answers—all in the midst of the rest of life, with children and jobs and a house and two cars.