Overland Park ? Ruth Saint knew her 19-year-old daughter was going to Pamplona, Spain, for its centuries-old running of the bulls.

She had hoped it was just to take pictures, perhaps from atop a tall building.

AA woman identified by officials as U.S. citizen Lindsey Saint, 19, from Overland Park, Kan., receives medical help after being injured by a bull in her left knee during the running of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain. Saint, a Kansas University student, was hospitalized Sunday.

Instead, Lindsey Saint was in the crowd of about 2,000 Sunday, ready to make the dash from a half dozen of the angry beasts. Near the finish line, the Overland Park teenager was gored in her left knee and was one of three injured seriously enough to be hospitalized.

“What can you do? I’m just thankful she’s alive,” Ruth Saint said Sunday night. She had just been through a long day of long-distance phone calls that began that morning when she found out about her daughter’s injury.

“Her dad was telling her, ‘Lindsey, you will have a really good story to tell your children and your grandchildren.’ “

In a telephone interview with KMBC television, Lindsey, who was in Spain on a Kansas University study abroad program, said she would “definitely do it again.”

“Some people might call me crazy. But when in Spain do as the Spaniards do, I guess,” she said.

She underwent surgery on Sunday and will be in the hospital for about five more days, Ruth Saint said.

“You sit here, and you raise your kids, and one of these days you have to let them go,” she said. “But you’re still a parent, and you will worry about them.”

It was the same feeling she had when Lindsey’s younger brother hurt himself recently on a ski trip in Colorado, and she again was alerted by phone.

“I told him (Sunday), when your sister gets back, neither one of you are going anywhere. Ever.”

More than 1,000 people, mostly men wearing white pants and red kerchiefs, normally take part in the daily runs but this number shoots up on weekend days during the festival.

The fiesta, famed for its all-night street parties, dates back hundreds of years but gained world fame from Ernest Hemingway’s 1926 novel “The Sun Also Rises.”

Overcrowding has made the runs extremely dangerous. Since record keeping began in 1924, 13 runners have been killed and more than 200 injured by the bulls.