My stepfather had what they called a triple-A, Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm. I don't know if I ever heard how they found it, but they went in and fixed it within a matter of days. The doctor told my mom (a nurse) afterwards that if he was in the operating room on the table with the surgeon standing over him with a scalpel in his hand when it ruptured, he would probably not have survived.

I had a guy that worked for me after I started with the City, then retired a few years later. He would get up every morning and walk around the section (4 miles). An RN would see him walking every morning, then one day as she was coming up behind him, he staggered and fell. She stopped to see if he was ok, and he had no pulse. They said his aorta had a 6 inch zipper-tear that basically dumped his entire blood supply into his chest cavity in seconds.