KANSAS CITY, KAN. ? Beverly Wilson and her brother, Bobby, were racing snowmobiles through their grandfather’s farm field near Burlington in December 2000 when Beverly turned to see her brother gaining on her.

But as she turned forward again, her snowmobile barreled through a five-strand barbed wire fence. The top wire caught her neck, severing her trachea.

Wilson, now a 23-year-old Kansas University medical student with a raspy voice, recently told her classmates the story of her survival and how she was so inspired by doctors’ efforts to help her breathe, eat and talk again that she has decided to become an ear, nose and throat doctor.

On the morning after the accident, doctors at Kansas University hospital called Michael Kennedy, a family practice physician who was working at the Burlington hospital when Wilson was rolled in.

“They told me it was quite amazing,” Kennedy said. “They hadn’t ever seen a clothesline injury like this because the survival rate on this type of injury is very low. They don’t even make it to the hospital.”

After she hit the fence, Wilson’s father, Terry Wilson, who had been trailing his children in a truck, scooped her up and started the eight-mile drive to the hospital. He had radioed home for someone to call an ambulance. It met him six miles up the road.

Kansas University medical student Beverly Wilson poses for a photo last month in Kansas City. Wilson, who severed her trachea in a snowmobile accident in 2000, has decided to become an ear, nose and throat doctor.

“I struggled to breathe,” Beverly Wilson said. “I couldn’t breathe, and I didn’t know what to do to make myself breathe.”

Paramedics could not clear an airway. They put an oxygen mask on her, but it was not helping. Wilson wasn’t getting oxygen. Seven minutes later at the hospital, an air passage was cleared. By then her oxygen level had dropped to 15 percent. It’s normal at 95.

Doctors did not know the severity of her injuries. There was no blood, no cuts or scrapes. The only mark on her was a red ring around her neck that Wilson called a hangman’s scar. A thick scarf she had wrapped around her neck to keep warm had guarded her skin.

Still, however, she was in trouble. Her chest had hit the barbed wire with such force that her lungs had collapsed. Doctors cut holes on both sides of her torso and inserted plastic tubes, similar to straws, to release air that had built up in her chest cavity and collapsed the lungs.

When she was stable, Wilson was flown to Kansas University hospital, where doctors inserted a plastic disc between the two pieces of Wilson’s severed trachea and then stitched her windpipe back together. Because the solid disc blocked the passage of air, doctors inserted a metal tracheostomy tube through a stoma in her neck, just below the disc, to enable her to breathe.

“I couldn’t cough or sneeze, talk or swallow,” Wilson recalled. “It was scary, because I didn’t know if I would ever be able to eat normally or to talk.”

She left the hospital eight days later, and the disc later was removed, but it was mid-February before she could eat solid food again. It would be much longer before she could talk. The tracheostomy was removed in March, and the stoma closed, leaving a small scar. But months of vocal exercises did not restore her voice. Because her vocal cords did not work, Wilson couldn’t muster more than a faint, airy whisper.

Wilson has lost track of how many surgeries she has had, but now when she talks, her voice is raspy but quite audible. She presses two fingers from her left hand over the stoma to trap air in her windpipe to enable her to talk. She removes the fingers to breathe.

“I’m not the same person I once was. I’m changed.” Wilson said. “I am just so much more conscious of my spirituality, of the way I live my day-to-day life, of who I am and who I want to be.”