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Albert suffered life-threatening injuries: an “open-book” fracture of her pelvis and a broken tailbone; a shattered left wrist and a broken right one; a ruptured spleen and bladder; fractured vertebrae and ribs; leg lacerations and massive blood loss. The broken bones of her pelvis pierced the skin of her legs.

“Sweetie, you’ve been in an accident,” one of her rescuers told Albert as she lay, confused and disoriented, on the highway. She had suffered a severe concussion and was in and out of consciousness.

“It hurts, it hurts, it hurts,” she told the woman.

In hospital, Albert underwent seven surgeries and was kept in a medically induced coma for a week. Doctors built a stabilizing scaffold for her pelvis with screws, pins and carbon fibre bars that protruded from her body like the frame of an unfinished house.

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When she woke up, Albert couldn’t move. A nurse had to turn her when she became hot, itchy or sore. Sleep came in the form of one-hour gifts.

Sometimes, Albert had to bawl for help since she couldn’t press the nurse-call button with both hands in casts. The pain, she says, was like nothing she had ever known: “It’s a deep-seated pain that goes through your entire body, through your bone. It’s so deep, it’s hard to fathom.”

Albert sat up in bed for the first time at the end of September. “I was very happy about that,” she says, “but the highlight was going to the bathroom by myself.”

During her worst moments, Albert would scream into her pillow in frustration. She hated being immobilized and her feet constantly pedalled to dissipate her unspent energy. “The hardest part of being in the hospital was not being able to move — and dealing with your own thoughts and pain. Because no one can help you. They can only give you drugs, but at a certain point — I was on the maximum of everything — you just have to work through whatever’s left.”