Laura Carstensen

Thank you.

Pleasure to be with you.

My priorities were dating, exploring, and thinking about future jobs and possibilities and where I would live and what I was going to do the next day, the next week, the next year.

not a lot about my future.

I didn't think at all about aging.

Yeah, I worked as a waitress in a restaurant and a bunch of us after closing decided we would go to a concert.

It was about an hour outside of town and we, you know, divided up into cars, drove out and we went to this concert.

At the end of the evening, we said, well, let's go back and play some pool.

So we divided up again into different cars and started to head back to town.

I happened to get in the car with a man I hardly knew who was very drunk.

And I caught on to that pretty quickly and asked him to stop.

I remember putting my hand out on the dashboard as he was going ever faster.

And that was the last thing I remembered before waking up in a ditch on the side of the road.

He drove off the road and rolled down an embankment.

The car turned two or three times over.

And I broke about 20-plus bones.

But my left leg was injured most badly.

My femur cracked in half, and I had many other fractures through the knee and the ankle.

And I cracked ribs.

I had a concussion, lots of facial lacerations.