Carstensen barely survived. She had a serious head injury, internal bleeding, multiple shattered bones. She spent months in the hospital. “It was that cartoonish scene, lying on my back, leg tied in the air,” she told me. “I had a lot of time to think after the initial three weeks or so, when things were really touch and go and I was coming in and out of consciousness. “I got better enough to realize how close I had come to losing my life, and I saw very differently what mattered to me. What mattered were other people in my life. I was twenty-one. Every thought I’d had before that was: What
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