After a devastating fall, Amber Kornhorst thought she faced certain death, but fate had other plans.
Amber Kornhorst, a 25-year-old registered nurse from Minnesota, plummeted 100 feet while hiking alone and was so seriously hurt that she feared she would die where she landed.
To her parents and friends, she typed good-bye notes into her cell phone. She told her mother and father this was "the end." She had no cell service and couldn't walk.
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She lay on a rock in Arizona and blew a traveler's whistle she carried with her.
Nearly 25 hours later, searchers found her.
"I thought, if I do die, at least I died doing something that makes me happy," she told Inside Edition from her hospital bed, at the Mayo Clinic, where she works as a nurse.
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The pain was excruciating, she said. She suffered multiple spinal fractures, a broken nose, and severe bruising and cuts.
It will be a long road to recovery, but Kornhorst doesn't care. She's just glad to be alive.
A GoFundMe account has been established to help with her medical costs.
Watch: Searchers Get Emotional Finding Remains of Missing Hiker 2 Years Later
