Grace Dammann asked her heart what she should do with her life. "Go to medical school" came the answer. She was 35 at the time. And she did. Later, as a doctor after a night on call, she showed up at the starting line of the Bay to Breakers footrace. She hadn't trained a minute for it and burst into tears at the starting line. But she began anyway. And halfway up Cardiac Hill a stranger fell in step with her. "Just keep going" he said, "You can do this. I'll pace you." He ran in step with her. Impossibly -- she finished the race. Three days the man who ran with her was brought into her clinic with pneumocystis pneumonia. He was dead within the week. The experience carved her. Grace was at the forefront of caring for AIDS patients in San Francisco when the epidemic broke. And in those first devastating years she signed 1200 death certificates. It was a brutal time and place to be a doctor. But she loved her job and showed up to be with patients even when there was very little that a doctor could do.

Five years ago a head on collision on the Golden Gate bridge broke multiple bones, pushed all her internal organs into her lung cavity and left her in a coma for 48 days. Incredibly -- Grace woke up.

Now in a wheelchair and riddled with physical challenges she says her life is no different from yours or mine, "It just takes me a little longer to do things. And there are some things that I will never be able to do again. But that is going to be everyone's reality eventually." A profound and simple truth that we too easily overlook.

Grace is still practicing medicine and also studying to be a Buddhist priest in a Zen tradition that has very formal prerequisites -- such as that each priest stitches her own robes. To see Grace's post-accident hands is to know that needlework is a highly illogical activity for them. (But then, I knew a man once with fingers crippled and twisted like an old tree, who logically speaking shouldn't have become a surgeon. But he did. And those crippled hands restored sight to hundreds of thousands). Grace is stitching her robe. She knows to 'just keep going'. Those of us blessed to listen to Richard interview her today have no doubt that she will, yet again, cross the finish line.