When Katherine Carrane returned home to her bedroom from the hospital, the toe shoes hanging in her room no longer looked like the next step in her dream to become a ballerina. Instead, the shoes reminded her of a recent and succinct split: her life before and after the accident.

Just a few months earlier, Carrane had stood waiting for the bus to arrive on a busy corner in suburban Philadelphia. She had lingered longer than usual that morning at home, hugging her mother and sleepily protesting her insistence that she attend seventh grade. It was September, the beginning of a difficult transition to junior high. She dragged her feet to the bus stop and chatted with other girls as they waited. It had rained that night, but the sky had just cleared in the early morning. Carrane stood at the outmost stretch of the circle, her back to the road.

Behind her, the light turned yellow. A driver hesitated, deciding whether to try and make the light, then braked. The streets were still wet. He spun through the light, through the intersection, and into the group of schoolgirls. Carrane took the brunt of the damage, hit twice by the spinning car. She can still hear the sound of the impact: a loud, sharp sound, like the strike of a bowling ball against pins.

There were screams, some shouts warning her not to get up. "My body felt heavy and hot. I thought, something bad's happened. It felt like jelly. Like I was jelly. And I thought, oh, this isn't good."

The impact had broken her pelvis and shattered her legs. A friend of hers ran home to call the police and an ambulance. "I don't remember being put in the ambulance, but I remember the ride. We were going down the street toward Bryn Mawr Hospital and the way we were going was away from my house. And I thought, I want to be going that way. I want to go home." Carrane wouldn't return home for months. It would be a fight to save her legs. After multiple surgeries, the doctor scheduled an amputation for her right leg. The day of the surgery, he detected a heartbeat in the leg and called it off.

Throughout this, the driver of the car, Juan (Carrane doesn't know his last name), came to the hospital daily to check on her, though she never met him. "I was so sick; he would just sit outside my room. But I've thought about him. I think about what he's had to live with, and the trauma that he's endured, and I want him to know, accidents happen. I'm not angry with him. It was a mistake. But my parents-my father in particular-was enraged. He said, you can't come anymore. You can't be here." Her father lost a leg in an accident when he was twelve.

Over the next decade, Carrane learned to walk again. The damage left its mark on her body. Her pelvis healed incorrectly, her legs are slightly different lengths and severely scarred, and she has no motion in her right ankle. As a young adult, she was self-conscious about her legs, covering them up and even going so far as to wear heavy, water-logged sweatpants when swimming.

"I was so naive," she recalls. "I had one doctor who told me, you know what, when you get older, this will all be fixed up. And I thought, literally, when I get older, they're going to fix this and it won't look the same. When I think about it now, I think, how did my brain let me think that? But it was a way to wrap my mind around it all."

She went in college to see a plastic surgeon for a consultation, thinking it was time to "fix it all up." Wanting to be tough, she went by herself while her parents waited. "[The doctor] said, 'You've had your surgery. They did a great job.' And I thought, 'Great? This doesn't look great, what are you talking about? I want my regular old legs back.' I remember being so devastated. It was the first time anyone had sat me down and said, look, you're going to have to live with this for the rest of your life. So get used to it."

But it wasn't as easy as that. Carrane had never spoken professionally to anyone about the accident. It wasn't until she attended graduate school at the University of Chicago that she sought out a psychotherapist. "I remember my therapist introducing me to the idea of choice to me, saying, you have the choice not to hide. It might be an uncomfortable situation, and you don't have to be all out with it either, but you have the choice."

These words prompted Carrane to take the first step toward becoming comfortable with the damage left by the accident-a process that would take years. She wore shorts to school. People looked, she said, but no one stared or really reacted. She decided to stop covering up-a decision later reinforced when raising two girls, Hope and Maddy, now 9 and 6. "I don't really think I could fully say, 'No big thing,' until I had daughters. And then I really thought, I want them to really know that it doesn't matter what's on the outside of anybody. That what's important is what's on the inside. I didn't want them to see me struggling, and I didn't want to struggle anymore." She knew she couldn't teach them to think healthily about their bodies while still being ashamed of hers. Now, when asked about her legs, she just laughs and says, "They're just for getting me around."

Carrane's tirelessness and genuine smile carries over to her daughters, who look to their mother with adoration. It's clear they not only think their mother is no different from anyone else, but better than everyone else. They gather around her, wiggling and vying for her attention. Once a week, the three of them meet up for "The Sisterhood" to talk about girl things. Carrane aims to make sure her daughters are comfortable talking about everything with her and grow up with good attitudes about being girls.

Competing in triathlons also helped Carrane transition into total comfort in her body. Over the past four years, Carrane has completed six triathlons, with four more coming up this summer. Her passion for tri's was born spontaneously on the stoop of her neighbor's house, when they hatched a plan to train and complete their first triathlon together. "I don't know what came over me. Maybe I was turning 40, that milestone birthday, but I said, yeah, I'll do that with you." Her neighbor didn't know about Carrane's accident. They started meeting early in the morning, training little by little for the big day. Carrane bikes and swims, but has to walk the run portion. "We had really little clue what we were getting ourselves into.

"It was a week before the Glenview triathlon, and [my neighbor's husband] said you know, you guys, you have to do two laps on the bike. Not just one. Because we were just practicing doing one at the course- we thought, that's a piece of cake. We can totally do this. And then we thought, 'Oh, two? That's going to be a little harder.'" She lets out a raucous laugh. "And then I just fell in love with it. I loved the challenge, and I loved that it was something I didn't even imagine doing, and then I did it. I finished the very last. I was the last person to finish the race. But I finished it. Now I have to figure out how to train and do this right, I thought."

Crossing the finish line that first time was both emotionally and physically draining, Carrane says. She hadn't been prepared for the level of competition she encountered at the race. "I kept thinking it was an individual thing, which is what initially attracted me to it. I just thought, I'll just do my own thing. But I got there and I saw these people with their game faces on, very buff, very serious about it. And they're flying by me on the bike and they're flying past me in the pool. So that side-swiped me a little bit."

But Carrane decided to use that competitiveness to her advantage, as a tool to urge her on when she wanted to slow down or quit. "When I'm thinking, I'm so tired, I can't lift my arm one more inch, [the competition aspect] tells me, keep going, keep going, you can do it." After her first tri, she decided to get serious. She joined a spin class and enrolled in a training group, Together We Tri, run by Kate Schnatterbeck in Glenview. Carrane was nervous about training with the group, but found a supportive team that would motivate her to do her best. "I'm always the last to finish. But it never crossed any of their minds that I couldn't do it. I was prepared for a barrage of questions, but no. No one batted an eye. Now I can't imagine doing this without the group. It's just so meaningful, and the people are all so lovely, and the support, and the good energy of it."

Carrane cries at every finish line, where her daughters meet her after every race. "In my brain, I can be Lance Armstrong on the bike, or Amanda Beard in the water, or Michael Johnson when I'm running. But I know I'll never be like that. And that's okay." That's what she wants to show her daughters. And she has.

Emily Withrow is a freelance writer and photographer based in Chicago. Her work has appeared in the Onion A.V. Club and the Daily Herald's Beep. Reach her at emilywithrow@gmail.com.