When Jim Magill decided to go on a trip across America with husband Alan for a 50th birthday adventure, he had no idea what actually lay ahead of him.
There are many ways this story could start, but suffice to say, Jim doesn't really do conventional.
It's how he found himself driving from New York to San Francisco in a $150,000 car, the only one of its kind in the US, raising vital funds for Alzheimer's Research UK.
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The Carrickfergus man has spent the last 17 years embarking on big car adventures, at one stage driving a Fiat Panda from Istanbul to San Francisco, via the Arctic and the Sahara.
He volunteers with the Lane Motor Museum in Nashville, Tennessee.
Basically, this involves him going out to collect European cars the museum is interested in and driving them to a location where they can be collected.
So when it came to mark his 50th with a big trip, he came up with the idea to contact the museum and ask could he borrow one of their more unusual cars, to drive it across America (New York to San Francisco) raising money for charity.
They agreed and so this time round, he found himself driving the world's "most economical car", the futuristic, curvy, sight-to-behold that is the Volkswagen XL1 (think of something like the cars seen in the film I, Robot).
At a time when fuel prices are a legitimate stress for many, Jim thought it would be interesting to drive a car that claims to get 300 miles from a single gallon of diesel, a car which was only ever manufactured 200 times worldwide.
But as he neared journey's end on his east-to-west odyssey, he noticed he was feeling off.
As they got closer to San Francisco, the feeling worsened and he eventually collapsed in a hotel in Santa Cruz on Monday, May 23.
"We ended up in the emergency room, as they suspected I had had a stroke," he told Belfast Live.
"I sort of was there for about a week, it wasn't actually a stroke though.
"It was a viral thing that had gotten into my nervous system and sort of gave me the symptoms of a stroke."
As it stands, doctors are still trying to work out exactly what is causing Jim's ill health.
"They started talking about 'it could be this, or it could be that, you know, stroke, MS, very life-changing things," he said.
"You just then went day by day, as each day they went 'ok it's not this extremely life-changing disease but now we're looking at this other very life-changing disease'.
"I think that was the hardest part, I was starting to feel a bit better but obviously they were starting to look for these very sort of awful topics of conversation."
Perhaps as frightening were the mounting costs of the barrage of test he was racking up, his last total bill standing at about $350,000.
"I had to get transferred between hospitals at one point, I think that ambulance ride cost about $10,000," he said.
"I had five MRIs, three CAT scans, a heart scan, they actually found a hole in my heart although it isn't anything to do with why I'm sick and it's very small and not dangerous.
"There's lots of stuff that came up out of this which is quite useful, but at the same time, it is eye wateringly expensive.
"It is quite scary that there is a certain amount of privatisation coming into the NHS because I have no idea how people sustain this."
Luckily, because Jim takes on challenges quite regularly, he pays for annual travel insurance, meaning he has escaped relatively unscathed financially.
"Funny enough, this is the first time I've ever had to use the travel insurance, and this in, I think, 17 years of going on big car adventures around the world, it's quite strange," he said.
"Of that eye watering amount of money, we only have to pay £75 because that's the excess on the insurance policy."
Not so luckily, his condition meant he couldn't drive the car, (again it must be stressed, it is the only one of its kind in America), back to Nashville.
That meant a volunteer flying all the way out to make the thousands-of-miles journey home in the precious vehicle, which thankfully, the museum was able to organise.
As for Jim, he is waiting on further test results and is hopeful that he may be able to fly home to continue his recovery there from next week.
In his own words, a 50th birthday plan has turned out to be "an event I'll certainly never forget!".
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