Laura Carstensen

the knowledge that I was embedded in a group of people who cared.

The way I remember this, it was about a month and a half before I thought about much of anything other than my injuries and

how badly I had been hurt.

But then I started to kind of wake up, if you will, and I started to get bored.

When you lay flat on your back with your leg up in the air, strung up in the air, there's just so much you can do day to day.

And I got really bored.

He had always wanted me to go to college.

I had not gone to college up to that point.

I was 21 in this accident.

And he suggested when I complained about being bored that maybe I should take a course.

And I was kind of resistant to it.

And he said, really, just name a course.

And he would go tape the lectures and bring them to me.

So I took introductory psychology as a hospital patient laying flat on my back with my leg tied in the air.

My dad was a saint, yes.

My dad was a biophysicist, by the way, and when he first asked me what I wanted to take, I was like saying, oh, not physics.

And he said, no, anything, anything.

And so, yes, he went to every lecture of introductory psychology with a tape recorder and tape recorded the lectures and brought them to me in the hospital.

Well, I had gotten to know the nurses.

You know, again, you're with the same people day after day.