Ashley Burks was 23 when her life changed. That year, 2005, she excitedly attended the Marfan Foundation’s Annual Conference in St. Louis. Upon arrival she was overwhelmed with emotion—for the first time in her life she saw other women who looked like her! Lean and lanky with long faces like hers, they looked like family. And as she got to know them, she was overjoyed that they had Marfan syndrome like she did, and they understood what she had gone through in her life.

During National Nurses Week, I would like to honor the wonderful men and women who serve tirelessly without much recognition. Several of them were such a help and inspiration when my husband Ted Ponder had surgery in 1989 because of his Marfan syndrome.