It was a sunny, clear Easter Sunday afternoon when Theresa Laurico stepped off the Harbourfront streetcar, with her teacup Yorkie tucked under arm.

She was heading to her condo after a service at St. Michael’s Cathedral with her dog, named Love. The plan was to go home and later head to an uptown restaurant for dinner with the family.

As the streetcar pulled away from her York St. stop, Queens Quay was bustling. Even in early spring, the area is a big draw for tourists and Torontonians alike, and the confluence of pedestrians, cyclists, public transit and vehicles requires a delicate dance, despite a 2015 redesign meant to showcase the waterfront and improve navigation.

Laurico walked to the end of the raised platform and stepped down into the street.

That was the moment of impact.

Traffic screeched to a halt. A crowd gathered. The tiny dog ran around in the confusion.

And pinned beneath the massive front wheel of an airport shuttle bus was Laurico — face-down, unconscious. Her right arm and part of her head were stuck beneath the wheel.

Paramedics and police arrived; the call went out for a body bag.

Dozens of pedestrians died on the streets last year. But this story turned out differently. Despite damage to her brain’s frontal lobe and spleen, and eight broken ribs — which led to a life-threatening condition known as a flail chest — Laurico survived. The recovery has taken a heavy toll: she was bedridden for months and struggled through depression, and it has taken nearly a year for her to feel strong enough to share her story.

“There’s the saying,” she says with a wry sense of humour, “that you never know what could happen today, you might get hit by a bus.

“I’m like ‘oh s--t, I did get hit by a bus.’ ”

The April 16 collision was out of the ordinary, but Laurico, 38, was only one of the many Toronto pedestrians who are seriously injured by motor vehicles each year. Between 2005 and 2016, 2,172 pedestrians were seriously hurt or killed in a collision with a motor vehicle. These accidents have stoked ongoing tensions between motorists on one hand, and cyclists and pedestrians on the other, over who bears more responsibility for road safety.

In a bid to reduce these accidents, Toronto police launched a campaign in January encouraging pedestrians to be attentive.

Dubbed “Road Safety … It Starts With You,” it features four videos primarily aimed at pedestrians, warning them to “Cross the road as if your life depends on it.”

Police Supt. Scott Baptist advised pedestrians to make themselves more visible to drivers by making eye contact with motorists, not listening to headphones while crossing the street, and wearing brighter clothing. He also advised motorists to slow down, make room around their cars for pedestrians, and keep an eye out for those on foot.

Some labelled the campaign victim blaming. Whatever you call it, Laurico, at five-foot-two and 138 pounds, stood little chance against a bus weighing thousands of kilograms.

As Laurico lay unconscious on the day of the accident, the family got another surprise: she received a jaywalking ticket. It was delivered by Toronto police to her mother, who was sitting anxiously by her side in an emergency ward.

Laurico was born in Toronto to Filipino parents, and as a teen aspired to be a pediatrician.

That changed when she was 17 and a high school teacher invited her to speak at a function honouring then police chief David Boothby. Laurico’s address was about the importance of the broader community fostering young leaders.

Until then, “I’d never received a standing ovation for just being me,” she says. “I wanted a career where I could do that and get paid.”

She decided that communicating was her forte and enrolled in journalism at Ryerson University in 1998, graduating four years later.

Her first big job was as an associate producer with the MuchMusic television station, where she produced several series, videos and promotions in the early to late 2000s. She also had many public speaking engagements.

She went through a period of financial struggles, but in 2011 Laurico launched her company, SociaLIGHT. She wanted to inspire young entrepreneurs and stimulate the growth of start-up companies. So she set up a major networking event to get young people in a room with successful businesspeople.

She says she tuned out all the negative feedback. “Comments like ‘you can’t do this in the biggest city in Canada. You can’t just come out of the gate. You’ve never organized a conference before.’ Ultimately, 1,000 people packed the Metro Toronto Convention Centre in November 2011 for an event opened by billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson.

“It proved that when you have a dream, things can happen,” she says, calling the conference one of her life’s biggest moments.

She later put on several more events with her company, and she continued her production work. Days before her accident she returned from California, where she was producing a documentary about motivational speaker Hal Elrod’s U.S. bestseller The Miracle Morning. It’s a book of recommended morning routines that Elrod claims can improve a person’s success.

The movie’s theme falls in line with her sense of optimism, one that would be severely tested.

As Laurico lay on the ground, one of the paramedics moved in to check her vital signs, and yelled: there’s a pulse.

The bus was rolled to free Laurico’s arm.

She was rushed to the emergency ward at St. Michael’s Hospital, where she awoke for a brief moment before she was transferred to the hospital’s trauma unit. She remained unconscious for seven days, hooked up to an IV and a catheter.

At one point doctors talked about amputating her right index finger. A surgeon was able to save it.

Laurico’s mother learned of her daughter’s accident in a phone call from the hospital’s emergency department. One of the paramedics later came to St. Mike’s to tell Laurico’s mother it was a miracle her daughter survived.

When Laurico awoke in her hospital bed a week after the accident, blood from a large sore was seeping through the sheets. She soon began to feel sharp pain, and any movement made it worse. She could barely breathe due to the tubes in her mouth and nose.

“All you want to know is how did this happen,” she says, “and am I going to live?”

Her mother was crying at her bedside, being comforted by Laurico’s aunts.

“My mom is a very strong woman. To see (her) collapsed in my aunts’ arms … was like, what is this?”

They were tears of relief. “I was overjoyed and so grateful to God for giving Theresa a second chance in life,” her mother says.

Nurses decided to give Laurico a sponge bath. But her hair was so matted from blood that they asked her mother to go out and buy detangling shampoo.

Getting the blood out took three rinses.

Laurico was put on powerful painkillers. The injury to her rib cage meant she couldn’t breathe properly and could only speak a few words at a time. Holding a conversation was impossible for several weeks.

A nurse in hospital tested Laurico’s cognitive function by asking questions about the time on a clock. Laurico drew a blank.

“I was crying, because why the hell could my brain not process this?” Laurico says.

She was released from hospital April 25 to convalesce at her mom’s house in Scarborough.

Laurico has no recollection of the accident, and what she knows is from what her mother was told by paramedics. (Toronto paramedics declined to talk to the Star.)

Laurico was reunited with her dog, who was separated from her in the collision. Someone — she doesn’t know who — took Love to Toronto Animal Services. He wore an identification tag, enabling Laurico’s sister to pick him up two days after the accident.

During those long, painful months, Laurico slipped into despair. “I went through a period of questioning why this happened to me, questioning what God was trying to tell me.”

Her right and left sides were immobilized from the broken ribs and she wore a cast that covered her right hand and arm. Initially she could only walk to the bathroom or kitchen with assistance. Two months after the accident she could only walk for 10 minutes, again with help.

She fell into a deep depression because the accident transformed her from a “type-A personality entrepreneur” to someone who relied on two private nurses to help her eat, bathe, brush her teeth and use the toilet. She also depended on doctors, specialists and her mother.

“Taking a shower in the morning and getting ready to do my morning routine was four hours long,” she says. Nurses “lifted me out of bed, flossed my teeth, brushed my teeth, washed my face.”

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The nurses cooked her breakfast and lunch and prepared the numerous medications doctors prescribed. Her mom made dinners.

“That was the psychological part: I was bawling my eyes out,” Laurico says. “All these everyday simple things you can’t even do.”

Her medical care included heart and lung testing, neurological tests and treatment for her head trauma, plastic surgery on her right hand to remove scar tissue, the removal of stitches in her head, MRIs, CAT scans and treatment for her sliced spleen.

She continues to undergo gastric-related testing. The accident caused her stomach to become elevated, which among other things causes burping. Nurses have had to massage her chest to remove the gas.

During all of this, Laurico found herself constantly asking what her future held, and whether she’d be able to walk again on her own.

Her occupational therapist, Lauren Okell, describes Laurico’s initial weeks of recovery as a “difficult and dark” stage. Laurico had to recover from the accident “physically, cognitively and emotionally,” says Okell.

“It was baby steps,” Okell adds. “Her first goal was to be able to shower on her own, and that took two months.

“I think at the beginning she was very pessimistic about her recovery, and there was a scary period of not knowing whether she’d have function in her right hand again.”

Dr. Alan Tam, a physiatrist who works with Laurico out of the head injury clinic at St. Michael’s Hospital and who treats medical conditions including those affecting the brain, spinal cord and nerves, believes Laurico likely suffered her brain injury from falling during the accident.

Her recovery was aided by the fact that she was young and was healthy before the incident, Tam adds. He also credits the attitude of his patient, who returned to her York St. condo at the beginning of August.

“She’s a very positive person, despite everything that has happened,” says the physician, who sees Laurico once a week at the head injury clinic. “But she isn’t where she was before this happened.”

At the beginning of last year, Toronto’s Vision Zero safety plan took effect.

The strategy to reduce collisions that result in serious injuries or death is based on a Swedish model of the same name that began in 1997. In Sweden, officials have lowered speed limits, created pedestrian-only zones and put up barriers separating bicycles from cars.

As a result, that country has seen a 50-per-cent decline in fatal accidents.

Toronto’s plan notes that from 2005 to 2016, in all incidents where victims were killed or seriously hurt, 45 per cent of the victims were pedestrians; 31 per cent were people travelling in cars; 14 per cent were on bikes; and 10 per cent on motorcycles.

Nine people were killed or seriously injured after being hit by a school bus, streetcar, or regional or municipal bus last year, according to the city’s Transportation Services department, one fewer than the number of victims in 2016.

In total 36 pedestrians were killed last year, according to Toronto police — a number that rises to 42 by the Star’s count.

Toronto allocated $80 million for Vision Zero, which includes funding for safety zones for senior pedestrians at a dozen locations, new red-light cameras at more than 70 locations, lowering speed limits at 32 additional locations, and safety audits at 14 spots where there’s a high rate of collisions. Pedestrians will also get more time to cross at 50 intersections.

The bus that struck Laurico was travelling 30 km/h in a 40-km/h zone. It was heading east. She was crossing north.

Police gave Laurico a ticket under Ontario’s Highway Traffic Act for failing to use a marked pedestrian crossing. The law doesn’t say how far away from a marked crossing a pedestrian can legally cross the road mid-block. But if there’s no marking, pedestrians can cross as long as they yield to oncoming vehicles.

No law absolves drivers of the obligation to take all due care to prevent a collision.

Laurico’s personal injury lawyer, Patrick Brown, who specializes in road safety cases, hastens to point out that in the context of a civil suit, when someone is struck and injured, the onus is on the person behind the wheel to show they were driving safely.

“When a vehicle strikes a pedestrian they have to prove they were using reasonable care when operating a vehicle,” Brown says.

Brown argues that bus drivers travelling along Queens Quay in particular have a “responsibility” to look out for pedestrians.

“This is a hugely, heavily pedestrian-travelled area. You just have to go down there and watch and you’ll see people crossing and walking in that area because it’s a tourist area, but it’s also a business area, and it’s also our waterfront,” Brown says.

Thien Hung Chau of Markham, the driver of the shuttle bus for Billy Bishop airport users, was not charged by police. Approached at the airport, he declined to comment.

His boss, Steve Gucciardi, a manager with Can-ar Coach Service, the business that operates the bus, said the accident was unfortunate and “pedestrians have to be careful crossing the road.”

He described the driver as “a good driver, 100 per cent. He’s very alert.”

The vehicle is owned by Tokmakjian Inc., based in Concord. Can-ar is a subcompany.

David Young, the lawyer representing Tokmakjian and its driver, said he is not in a position to comment as the matter is before the courts.

Laurico is planning to sue the owner of the bus, the driver and Billy Bishop airport. (The airport, as well as Nieuport Aviation Infrastructure Partners, which owns and operates the passenger terminal and manages its shuttle services, declined comment.)

Laurico is still not able to return to work. She’s paying for her lawyer and the private nursing care she needs with her own money, help from her family, and insurance.

She’s angry police decided to ticket her and not the driver. Her feelings toward the driver are complex.

She wonders how he must be feeling about hitting her.

“The human in me is empathetic to what he must also be going through as a driver. He almost killed a human being. What is it to carry that in your soul, in your heart?”

And the accident has given her a new perspective.

“Love and I are walking miracles,” she says. “For my body to have taken that kind of impact … I can read, breathe, walk now. I was graced with a second chance in life.”

Laurico says there are plans for the Miracle Morning movie to come out in the spring, and she’s aiming to launch another corporate event in Toronto in the fall.

And there’s a date this summer she’s keeping in mind. On Aug. 2, she has her third scheduled appearance in provincial court in Toronto — still fighting her $50 ticket for jaywalking.