Lisa was unconscious as her organs died incrementally. The next day, doctors took out her ovaries and sections of her large and small intestines. On Day 5, surgeons removed her gall bladder and performed an ileostomy, which funneled her waste to a bag on her abdomen. Meanwhile, her liver couldn't keep up with the toxins that were forming in her body. And her limbs were darkening ominously.

"Each day," wrote Steve in an e-mail to his friends, "is a new emotion based on one or two central themes — fear and sorrow, mostly for each day Hannah is without her mommy. I am trying to stay positive and trying to envision our family as four people in the future. I continue to pray. I continue to talk to Lisa, even when I'm not in the room with her. I wear her wedding ring around my neck on a chain she normally wears — I won't take it off until I can put it back on her finger, or at least around her neck."

Lisa and Steve met at a party in Chicago in 1996. That first night they talked for five hours straight, about his Peace Corps stint in Micronesia and her medical missions to Peru, and the bumpy terrain of relationships. Already, they discovered, they could discuss anything without flinching. "Blunt" and "Blunter," their friends affectionately nicknamed them. They got married two days after Christmas in 1997, put their belongings in storage and immediately set off on a three-month whim-driven, low-budget honeymoon through the South Pacific. In 1998 they settled in Utah, lured by the promise of mountain trails.

Lisa was a hiker, a skier, a biker, a hugger, a nurse, a traveler, a woman who never sat still. If there was one moment that summed Lisa up, it was that time on a camping trip to Idaho when Steve was struggling to land a large fish and Lisa took off her clothes to jump in the river and toss it up on the bank. Then she ran in her underwear down the road looking for the sign that would tell them if they could keep the fish.

On Day 12, Lisa was transferred to the burn intensive care at University Hospital. More like chemotherapy than fire, the strep-induced toxins had burned her from the inside out. It seared more than half of her body, including her tongue, and her hair fell out in clumps.

· · · · ·

Before it can destroy, invasive Strep A has to find a way in. Its doorway could be a wound, even one as innocuous as a bug bite. Half the time, it simply finds a vulnerable area — a sprain or a bruise — with no skin break. Boise microbiologist Amy Bryant tells of a child who bumped his knee while trick or treating. Within 48 hours, doctors had to amputate his leg because of strep.