Henrietta Hilberath, a retired special-education consultant who had proudly taken part in Detroit’s Thanksgiving Parade for almost ten years, arrived last November ready to dress as a giant peapod. The costume was part of a food-bank-themed section of the parade, and she was getting suited up in a building along Woodward Avenue just hours before the event began.

But before she could finish putting on the outfit, everything changed. A sudden medical emergency forced her into more than eight hours of surgery at Detroit Medical Center, where doctors discovered an aortic dissection—a life-threatening tear in the main artery that sends blood from the heart throughout the body.

While she recovered, staff members at Harper Hospital affectionately nicknamed her “the peapod,” a reference to the outfit she never got to wear.

Now fully healed and eager to return, Hilberath plans to join the parade once again—this time dressed as an elf and walking with her niece, who will also be costumed as one. She hopes to help carry the parade’s opening banner, a personal symbol of both gratitude and resilience.

“I was determined to come back,” she told Deadline Detroit.

Detroit’s Thanksgiving morning is always lively: runners pack the Turkey Trot early in the day, parade participants gather soon after, and football fans pour toward Ford Field for the Lions’ game—last year’s matchup was against the Chicago Bears.

Hilberath and her niece, Lisa McCormick, arrived around 5:30 a.m. at Wayne State University’s student center. As she pulled on the peapod costume, an intense stab of pain shot through her shoulder. It grew unbearable. She assumed it might be a pulled muscle—until she began vomiting, lost consciousness, came to, and blacked out again.

Her niece called 911 immediately. Because EMS teams were already stationed nearby for the parade, help arrived quickly. She was rushed to Detroit Receiving Hospital, just over a mile away.

Doctors identified the emergency instantly: an aortic dissection, a condition that many patients do not survive.

Dr. Frank Baciewicz, a thoracic surgeon with Wayne State University School of Medicine, quickly assembled his surgical team. Hospital staff urged Hilberath to contact her loved ones—they weren’t sure she’d make it.

“I remember someone saying, ‘If there’s anything you want to tell your family, now would be the time,’” she recalled. She asked whether a Catholic chaplain or priest was available to give last rites. A chaplain spoke briefly to her over the phone while her husband and adult children rushed to the hospital.

She told them she loved them and hoped she’d make it through.

Hilberath remained under sedation for days. When she finally woke up that Saturday, and more fully by Sunday, she felt disoriented. “The last thing I remembered was putting on the peapod costume,” she said. “Then suddenly I was hooked up to machines, with tubes in my chest and a mask over my face.”

Dr. Baciewicz later explained that the surgery was extensive: in her case, the tear stretched from just above the aortic valve all the way down toward her legs. Only an estimated 6,000 to 8,000 people in the U.S. face this crisis each year, and 10–20 percent undergoing the surgery don’t survive. He began operating before the Lions kicked off against the Bears and finished before the game ended.

Hilberath isn’t sure whether she arrived with the costume pieces or whether her niece mentioned it, but the peapod story traveled quickly inside the hospital. Staff members from multiple departments stopped by to check on “the peapod lady.” Someone from the pulmonary team peeked into her room just to see how she was doing; even a lab employee stopped in with the same question.

She is deeply grateful for the care she received.

“I had an incredible cardiac team. They gave up their Thanksgiving and saved my life.”

Her dermatologist, Dr. Wendy Sadoff, later told her why staff reacted so joyfully to her recovery: “They see traumatic cases every day, and the outcomes aren’t