Life is full of tiny details that flit by mostly unnoticed, except perhaps in retrospect. Lisa's list would later include toenails and taste buds and the pale blue wool socks she bought for herself with some birthday cash.

Lisa was so sure she was leaving the hospital on March 1 that she asked a friend to dinner that night. Still, says her mother, when she talked to Lisa by phone, the conversation was off. At times, Lisa seemed to make no sense.

By the time Lisa should have been gathering up her flowers and wrapping Lily for the trip home, there was no question something was wrong. In pain and frightened, she had called Steve early in the morning to tell him she was having trouble breathing and her stomach was swollen and sore. Probably a kinked bowel, doctors reassured Steve as they wheeled her in for exploratory surgery early in the afternoon.

Friends waited with Steve as the hours dragged on. Finally, doctors brought news that turned his world on its head. "Your wife is as sick as a human being can be and still be alive," is how friend Susan Heiner remembers it. What doctors had assumed was a routine problem turned out to be a massive infection; they had removed her uterus, which was oozing pus.

Lisa's future was being measured in minutes: If she made it through this minute, she had a chance of surviving the next one. If she somehow made it one hour she might make it two — but with every organ in her body struggling, no one believed she'd survive the night. Even the whites of her eyes were swollen. She lay unconscious, her eyelids stretched so tight they couldn't close. Her skin was mottled, purple and blue and gray, as if she'd been beaten.

Later that evening, Lisa's mother, Dee Borowiak, arrived from Chicago. Susan took her upstairs to Lisa's empty hospital room, still filled with congratulatory balloons and Lisa's slippers, where nurses handed her Lily. OK, there will be no nonsense here, Dee told her tiny granddaughter. "You're going to eat and grow and get fat and happy, so that when your mother gets out of the hospital she'll know this was all worth it." Then Dee went downstairs to see her daughter.

Lisa is the youngest of Dee and Bill's four children, the one who always tested every explanation; the little girl who wouldn't stay away from the creek in their back yard in Lockport, Ill., even when her parents told her she was too small to be out there catching frogs with the big kids.