The trope of saintly survivor is a familiar one. A young person inured or ill before her time is left desperately fighting for her life but through tremendous courage, indomitable spirit, and the assistance of charismatic and wonderfully skilled doctors she staggers back from the brink to serve as an Example For Us All. To this Katie McKenna would, I suspect, say "horse hockey" or some other dismissive phrase. After being catastrophically injured when she was (no spoiler) run over by a truck on the streets of New York, Katie was terrified, in paid beyond useful description, and suffering from very "domitable" spirit. Her medical care, while initially life saving and state of the art disinigrated into uncaring, dismissive, and cruel when she came out of the ICU.The Katie is not a paper hero - and not really a hero at all. She was an athletic, enthusiastic, outgoing young woman with an apartment, a job, a boyfriend, friends, family and an exciting future stretching before her until she she was not - and "Katie 1.0" as she occasionally called herself, was replaced by a broken husk of a woman unable to perform the slightest act of self care, her dignity stripped away as caregivers had to perform acts of personal invasion that she had never even known existed.So how did she survive? In this spellbinding memoir she gives us insight into the wreckage of her life and dreams, her despair for the future, and the challenges posed by being helpless and in constant electric waves of pain - pain ameliorated but not hidden by the drugs. But this memoir is also a paean to her family - the mother and father and sister and brother who set their lives essentially aside to hold her, comfort her, fiercely advocate for her and care for her as she took each painful, halting step away from the brink and back to independence and healing. The friends who pushed aside the awkwardness at seeing the very different and changed Katie and were there for her to talk to her as if she were a woman in full and not just a crippled and hurting remnant. Friends who paid for a mariachi band to come to the hospital to serenade her and bring her the first genuine moment of joy since the accident.Katie does give us insight into the various decision points when she could have spiraled downward into hopelessness, but when she chose instead to take risks, to accept challenges, to not let pain and restrictions limit her. There was the occasional doctor or nurse who were truly compassionate and devoted to her recovery but throughout the book the strength offered by her family and her unlimited love for them is the constant theme - the theme that results in her recovering her mobility and her dignity.I gave this five stars for the enormously human connection and insight it offers but it seemed to me that the book wrapped up too quickly as if Katie got tired of thinking about it finally. I didn't know nearly as much about Katie 2.0 as I would have liked. She says she no longer can run but she can power walk - I would have been interested to know how full a recovery she made and what affects remain other than the physical scars.In all, a wonderful book that makes the reader an observer to an epic fight.