Henrietta Hilberath at a costume fitting in prepration for last year's parade.

Henrietta Hilberath, a retired special education consultant from Livonia, had been marching in the annual Detroit Thanksgiving Parade for nearly a decade. Last year, hours before the parade, she started suiting up as a peapod in a building not far from the route on Woodward Avenue, as part of a theme on community food banks.

But before she could completely slip into the costume, a near-death experience came knocking, followed by more than eight hours of surgery at the Detroit Medical Center to repair an aortic dissection – a serious tear in the wall of the aorta, the main artery that carries blood from the heart to the rest of the body.

During her recovery, staff at Harper Hospital, part of DMC, affectionatel

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