Yao Lin left a conservatory in Odessa, Ukraine, where she had been studying piano in 2009 and traveled more than 5,000 miles to DeKalb.

Lin, 25, whose friends around DeKalb call her Lina, was only a couple of months into her stay when she suffered an injury that threatened to rob her of her lifelong passion.

On an icy day in December 2009, Lina was riding a bicycle when she hit some ice, fell and broke her left wrist. The father of her host family, Paul Meier, took her to the emergency room at Kishwaukee Community Hospital, where she met Dr. Robert Swartz, a hand surgeon with Sycamore-based Midwest Orthopaedic Institute, who operated on her wrist the next day.