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Her life seemed perfect until Wendy Ford was stricken and rendered comatose within days, and then, after a tense, weeks-long struggle for survival, quadriplegic. At one of the most renowned hospitals in the world, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, the Harvard teaching hospital known as "Harvard with a heart," her doctors -- Harvard Medical School professors all -- were helpless to diagnose and treat her, hard as they tried, as the rare malady confounded even them and she slipped further and further away. Initially, she was not expected to live, nor, ultimately, to walk again or recover her prior intellectual abilities. Doctors have referred to hers as a "miracle case," and the mysteries persist to this day.