Dusty Carr stood bewildered in the fluoroscan imaging room with the pediatric neurosurgeon, struggling to grasp the news about his 8-year-old daughter, Taylor.

"I was wrong," the brain surgeon said.

Two months earlier, Dusty's wife, Mary Jo Carr, had been driving Taylor home from school. She was a minute away from pulling into their driveway at the end of a rural, gravel road.

The vehicles on the road kicked up clouds of dust around them. She was following a neighbor's truck and an oncoming car had pulled over to allow the truck to pass. Neither Mary Jo nor the other driver saw each other through the dust and collided head-on.

She didn't feel her own broken bones when she pulled Taylor from their Nissan Altima. Her daughter didn't have a mark on her, but her eyes had rolled back in her head and her body was turning blue.

"I saw she was starting to die," Mary Jo said.

She put her daughter in the neighbor's truck and headed toward the EMTs who would put Taylor on the helicopter that life-flighted her from Mexico, Mo. to Columbia Medical Center.

Taylor had two fractured vertebrae in her upper spine. Her brain was bleeding in nine places. Her liver was lacerated. She had no feeling or movement from her neck down.

The doctors put Taylor on a ventilator to breathe and induced her into a coma for 15 days.

They tried to prepare her parents.

"Did you know what Christopher Reeve was like?" they asked.

Mary Jo refused to accept this fate for her daughter. She refused to meet with other parents of children with severe brain and spinal cord injuries. She Googled for hours, looking for a success story from a child with injuries like her daughter's who walked out of a hospital.

She found none.

"Taylor will be the exception to the rule," she told the nurses and doctors.

Her bright and active second-grader was not going to get cheated out of the life she had.

All they could do was wait for the swelling in her brain to go down and face the long odds of recovery.

Taylor woke up with a halo: a metal ring around her head, attached with metal pins, to hold her neck and head in place. She also had a tracheostomy to help her breathe.

She opened her eyes and smiled at her parents.

That was a hopeful sign.

Her parents didn't tell her the extent of her injuries. She started to regain feeling on one side. Eventually, she picked up her left arm with her right, let it go and watched it drop on the bed.

Taylor looked at her parents: What was going on?

She was going to get better, they told her. She was going to work hard to get better. After a month in the hospital, she transferred to Ranken Jordan, a pediatric rehab facility.

Her physiatrist, Dr. Eugene Evra, greeted Taylor in Russian in the mornings when he checked on her. She decided she wanted to learn his native language, so he taught her a new word every day. He wrote it down, stuck it next to her bed and repeated the word with her.

Preevyet! (Hi!), Taylor would say.

Kak dela? (How are you?), Dr. Evra asked.

Khorosho. (Fine.)

Poka! (Bye!)

He was hopeful about her recovery from the moment she arrived at Ranken Jordan. Her motivation to get better was so strong. Her family never left her side.

She started her three hours of therapy each day with gut-wrenching and often explicit Eminem lyrics. She knows the entire new album. Before tackling the pain of learning to move again, she plays the Eminem song that pushes her: "Not Afraid."

Since the accident, Taylor has cried once. It was when she asked about Halloween, and her parents told her she had missed it.

Mary Jo is haunted by what-ifs. But then she watched her daughter take her first steps with a walker. These were tears of joy, of unrelenting faith.

The Carrs wanted nothing more than to bring their girl home for Christmas. Before there was a chance of that, Taylor faced another major surgery: She would have to get the stretched ligaments in her spinal column fused and a metal plate inserted in her neck. They had been told by Dr. Jeff Leonard, associate professor in pediatric neurology and neurocritical care at St. Louis Children's Hospital, that the surgery was in her best long-term interest.

So Dusty was trying to understand Dr. Leonard's change of heart when he saw Taylor's latest scans, right before the surgery was to be scheduled.

"She's made a remarkable recovery," Dr. Leonard said. "She just keeps beating all these odds." Instead of prepping her for a spinal cord fusion, doctors removed her halo and trach. She spent 24 hours back at Ranken to see how she fared.

She was ready to go home.

The first night home, she slept with her parents, her little brother and their dog together on the sectional in the family room.

"Being home and having our Christmas tree up ... There's snow outside. It's an overwhelming feeling," Dusty said.

"I call that a miracle."

Sixty turned so sexy this year.

For women, in particular, the ages from 60 to 80 are no longer a time to become invisible and move to the sidelines. This golden age has become the time to take center stage.

In 2013, women redefined which era of life can be our most powerful and most fulfilling. The same year that Miley Cyrus twerked her way into adulthood, Diana Nyad swam from Cuba to Florida.

Cyrus, now 21, could be a poster child for the long, harrowing "adultolesence" through which so many 20- and 30-somethings struggle to define themselves and transition into a grown-up life.

But Nyad, at 64, became a poster child for capturing dreams long deferred. And she was hardly the only woman this year who showed us what it means to hit your peak when people assume that peak is long behind you.

Janet Yellen, at 67, is set to become one of the world's most powerful people when the U.S. Senate approves her to chair the Federal Reserve System, the country's central bank and an influencer of the global economy. That sort of power and authority were long associated with men of a certain age, but all that's about to change.

Hillary Clinton could win the White House at 69, a year younger than when Ronald Reagan took over the presidency. In her four years as secretary of state, Clinton kept an indefatigable pace, traveling almost a million miles to 112 countries.

Senator Elizabeth Warren, 64, transformed from Harvard law professor to power broker leading the charge for change within the Democratic party.

And the gifted Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize in Literature this year as the "master of the contemporary short story" at the age of 82.

When a young athlete needs inspiration to power through a difficult challenge, let her imagine Nyad swimming for days in a face mask to protect her from poisonous jellyfish. When a frustrated young artist wonders if her work will ever be recognized, let her read the exquisite prose of Munro. When young activists despair of ever creating a better world, let them know that change and progress are not exclusive to any age.

There have always been role models rejecting the notion that vitality and worth are somehow tied to a number. Consider Meryl Streep, 64, widely considered one of the greatest actors of our time, and still a mere neophyte compared to 91-year-old Betty White. But in 2013, a critical mass of women drove home this point.

Given how much longer it takes to get a foothold in one's career in this economy, and how much longer people are waiting to get married and start having children, it makes sense that the height of accomplishment can now come long after what were once considered one's glory days.

We've shifted the entire life cycle by increasing our life expectancy, extending the period of fertility and launching from one career to the next. We expect to be working longer, so our full potential may well be realized sometime beyond 60. In a youth-obsessed culture, we are better served by turning our gaze forward, looking with anticipation at what may become our best time yet.

The best part of Nyad's story came after her feat of perseverance and strength.

In her 20s, she had denigrated and criticized the same swim in 1978 when it was completed for the first time ever by a 65-year-old Ohioan named Walter Poenisch. She called him a cheat for using fins and taking short boat breaks. Nyad would later face similar criticism from marathon swimmers for her own use of a protective face mask and bodysuit.

Nyad was quoted in the Miami Herald in 1978 before Poenisch's attempt: "A man who's 65 years old and very overweight is not going to swim for two days nonstop."

He proved her wrong. She recently said she regretted the words from the foolish days of her 20s.

Perhaps conquering summits in your 60s and beyond allows the added advantage of wisdom.

Brandi Kostal still had internal stitches a week and a half after giving birth via a complicated caesarean section in March, but she stopped taking her pain medication and dragged herself to her graduate-level classes to become a chiropractor.

If she missed more than 15 percent of her classes, her professors would fail her. They would fail her despite the fact that she says she had stayed in touch with them during her pregnancy and asked how she could make up any missed work following the birth of her daughter. Despite the fact that she emailed the dean of student services from her hospital bed hours before her surgery appealing for help in keeping up her academic record. Despite the fact that her doctor wrote her a letter saying she was a "high risk" patient and would be "incapacitated for recovery" for a little more than a month.

They would fail her -- despite the fact that it would be a violation of federal law.

Her pleas fell on deaf ears at Logan University, where Dean of Student Services James Paine responded to her email with: "Unfortunately, child birth is not currently listed as an event for which attendance is excused."

How baffling that an institution charged with creating future health care professionals would treat its own students' health issues with such disregard. It's difficult to figure out if the professors, deans and legal counsel involved in this case at Logan simply had a hard time understanding the laws governing them, or if they truly believe their students should attend class even if their water breaks and contractions begin.

"The law is really clear," Lara Kaufmann, senior counsel at the National Women's Law Center, said. "Women should not have to choose between getting an education and having a baby."

Kostal contacted the NWLC, which filed a discrimination complaint informing the school that it was violating Title IX, the federal law that prohibits sex discrimination in schools. Logan settled the case earlier this week by removing two failing grades from Kostal's transcript, allowing her to make up the missed work and reimbursing her for tuition she had paid while pregnant and recovering. It also promised to train its faculty about Title IX obligations.

Kaufmann said the agency has gotten an increasing number of similar complaints in the past five or six years, handling calls from students on a weekly basis who are penalized for getting pregnant and having a baby. In May, the advocacy group settled a similar case against the City University of New York on behalf of a pregnant student who had been told that if she went into labor and missed her finals, there would be no opportunity for her to make them up. She was advised to drop her classes.

Kostal says she was stunned when she received the email from the dean telling her she was out of luck.

"I was in unbelievable shock that in this day and age, this could actually occur. I was made to feel like I had done something wrong, and I was having a baby."

The Education Department for the Office of Civil Rights sent colleges a letter in June clarifying that Title IX meant "a school must excuse a student's absence because of pregnancy or childbirth for as long as the student's doctor deems the absences medically necessary." The student must be allowed to return to school at the same academic status as before the medical leave, the letter said.

Really. This had to be spelled out for professionals in higher education. In 2013.

Logan University general counsel Laura McLaughlin did not return calls for comment, but the university released a statement saying: "We are pleased to have resolved the disagreement with this student in a way that we believe will further enhance our policies and opportunities for Logan students. Our new policies and procedures will help us continue to meet evolving federal requirements."

This particular federal requirement hasn't evolved much in 40 years.

However reluctantly, it's good see Logan University finally has.