She walks her class route through the UF campus several times before each semester starts. She goes to bed at 10 every night, and she gets up at 8 every morning. She writes exactly what she did that day in her journal and reviews it before she goes to bed.
Abby Mize was in a car accident.
On Nov. 12, 2005, a car crashed into Mize's Toyota Echo as she left bowling practice at Palm Beach Central High School, where she was the captain for the varsity bowling team. The accident was two days before the team went to a state competition.
The car spun around three times and came to a stop in the middle lane. She was ejected from the back window halfway through the first spin.
The accident caused traumatic brain injury, damaging her frontal and temporal lobes and her optic nerve. As a result, she has no peripheral vision on her right side, has third-nerve palsy in her right eye, which prevents the eye from constricting and moving up, and some short-term and long-term memory loss.
"I remember interacting was extremely difficult (immediately after the accident), even now, but I think it bothers other people more than it bothers me," she said.
Mize was in a coma for seven weeks out of the four months she spent in the hospital following the accident. But Mize said the experience was fun.
While she was in the coma, Mize dreamed she was in heaven with God, and he would tell her what was happening around her.
The doctor thought she would die before Christmas, and Mize's parents switched doctors soon after that.
Mize said she had to relearn even basic conversation skills after the coma. When she was going through physical therapy, she and her mom would call a friend, put the phone on speaker and practice speaking with others.
Learning to walk was the worst part of physical therapy though, Mize said.
But relearning social skills was the hardest thing of all, Mize said, and she is still working at it.
Mize said she is constantly asking "Is this appropriate?"
After four months in the hospital, weeks of rigorous therapy and repeating her senior year of high school, Mize is making her way through her fourth semester at UF with the help of family, friends and the Disability Resource Center.
Mize relied on her roommate, boyfriend and brother when she started taking classes at UF, Mize's brother, Patrick, said.
She would call him asking for a ride or how to get somewhere on campus, or she would have a question about the bus, he said.
Before the accident, Patrick said Mize was independent and relied on herself, but now she seeks validation from others.
"I can do this. I used to be able to do this," Mize often tells herself.
The realization that this is not always true is difficult for Mize. Particularly with bowling, her score is not as high as it was before the accident, she said with a hint of frustration in her voice.
Before the accident, Mize was taking five Advanced Placement and two honors classes.
The crash dropped her IQ score from 138 to about 107, Mize's mother Wanda said.
Now, by the time she gets home and looks over her notes, she has forgotten most of what was said in class, forcing her to re-read the chapter in the textbook at least two or three times aloud and re-write her notes.
"It irritates me at times," Mize said. "It bothers me that I can't remember what Will (her boyfriend) and I did for my birthday last year. When I took a test, I knew I learned that (a sign for American Sign Language class) earlier that morning, but I couldn't remember the answer."
When Mize took macroeconomics her first semester at UF, the material covered was too difficult for her to remember, even after the usual studying, and she had to drop the class.
But the obstacles haven't quenched her desire to be a Gator.
When Mize was 12 years old, she decided she wanted to attend UF, she said.
Her acceptance letter arrived while she was in the hospital, but the injuries caused Mize to have to repeat her senior year, so her parents had her acceptance deferred.
"I was terrified," Mize said of going to UF. "I was worried about the social aspect, about how people would react to me."
Because she cannot drive, Mize sometimes gets lonely in her apartment, she said.
She leaves her house for class around 9 a.m. and often will not return until early evening, just to avoid the lonely room. She doesn't have a roommate where she lives right now, which makes it even harder for her to get around.
Will Dong, Mize's boyfriend, used to take her to her classes before the semester began to make sure she knew the route, he said. But now that she has been at UF a little longer, he doesn't do it as much.
Because of the difficulty Mize has in her classes as a result of her memory loss, the Disability Resource Center helps her by providing note takers, extra test time, special seating and the ability to record classes.
Because of vision loss on her right side, when class lectures or slides are on the right side of the room, she has to sit on that side to see them.
When asked about her memory, Mize put her finger to her chin, visibly trying to recall the events of the day before.
"What did I do yesterday?" Mize asked playfully.
Mize takes Aricept, the medication commonly used for Alzheimer's patients, to help with her memory.
"Without (Aricept) I couldn't remember what I did at the beginning of the day," she explained.
During Mize's first semester at UF she was registered for 13 credits but had to drop two classes.
"It's hard to stay focused," Mize said. "It's hard to remember what I studied after I studied it."
To help her remember and think cognitively the next day, Mize goes to bed at 10 every night.
When she doesn't get enough sleep, her speech slurs and her memory is even worse than normal, she said.
The one thing that didn't change, her mom said, was her persistence to be a Gator.
"We didn't think she was ready," Mize's mom remembered. "We thought we would be going to get her one month later."
One of Mize's first experiences at UF was also one of her worst. During a home football game in 2007, she didn't have tickets to the game, so she decided to go to the mall. When she left, she boarded the wrong bus, and in a rush to get off the wrong bus and onto the right one, which had just pulled up to the bus stop, she fell and broke her finger.
Mize's vision makes it hard to navigate the campus, especially in the beginning.
Mize said during her first week at UF she fell down about eight times. Now she falls down one time a week at most.
Mize knows how to find the Reitz Union and Mallory Hall, the first dorm she stayed at when she got to UF. These landmarks help her find other buildings, she said.
But the physical and emotional obstacles often pale in comparison to her emotional plight.
She admits she has difficulty being accepted by other students on campus.
Mize said that when she returned to high school after the accident, her best friend started avoiding her, later saying, "I just don't like the new you."
"Peers tend to reevaluate and look back when they find out I have a disability," she says. "I'm still normal, just try and accept me."
Despite the challenges she faces, Mize is happy at UF.
She plans to graduate in about three and a half years and go to graduate school for speech pathology.
"I want to rewrite the world of head injury," she said.
But Mize thinks she still needs to put the accident behind her.
"I think I will be able to move on, but right now I'm just not able to," she said.
This past summer, Mize wore high-heeled shoes for the first time since the accident.
"It was pretty good," she commented with a smile. "I hadn't been able to since the accident. I like it, but I always fall down."
