She lost her legs in a boat explosion. Now she remembers her ‘miracle’ every day.

After a tourist boat exploded beneath Stefanie Schaffer’s seat, mangling her legs, she lay in a hospital bed wondering whether she would ever walk again. But before she surrendered to despair, her doctors unknowingly inspired her.

“Every day when the trauma team would do their rounds, I would hear them outside my door,” said Schaffer, 22, about her stay at Broward Health Medical Center in Fort Lauderdale. “And they’d say, ‘The girl in this room is a miracle.’ And it just made me feel grateful to be alive for a couple of minutes each day.”

On the back of the Rutland, Vt. college student’s left arm is a tattoo.

“Miracle,” it says.

Schaffer wants to finish her final year at Castleton University in Vermont, where she is majoring in public health. She wants to earn a master’s degree in the same subject, and eventually work with people who have disabilities.

She isn’t dating, and said, “I never really dated before the accident, either. It’s a possibility. We’ll see.”

Learning to drive with hand controls is also on her to do list.

To those who survive life-altering injuries that require extensive rehabilitation, she said, “The most important part is to stay motivated. Even when it feels like it’s not gonna get any better.

“The medical staff can do their part, but the rest is on you,” she said. “And you have to keep going to therapy and you have to keep pushing yourself hard. Because if you don’t, you never know where you’re gonna get to.”

ljtrischitta@sunsentinel.com, 954-356-4233 or Twitter @LindaTrischitta

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