Monday, July 02, 2007
Drunken driving exacts quiet toll on crash survivors - Seattle P-I
Joline Heldt isn't used to seeing her son's legs so shrunken that his bones show through his skin.
She remembers his broad shoulders edging out opponents in rec league basketball games. Now they are a hallmark of muscle atrophy, which has stolen 40 pounds from his frame.
Sean Heldt, bedridden in a rehabilitation facility, is in a coma, four weeks after a drunken, wrong-way driver on Interstate 90 hit his Chevrolet Lumina head-on.
Doctors don't give his mother much hope. But Heldt still talks to her 24-year-old son, clinging to the idea that her love gets through the tubes and casts that cover him.
"When he wakes up, we don't know if he'll remember us," she said. "I don't know if I'm going to get my son back."
Sean Heldt is one of the drunken-driving victims rarely heard about -- people permanently scarred, gravely injured or clinging to life with crushing medical bills. ...
Joline Heldt isn't used to seeing her son's legs so shrunken that his bones show through his skin.
She remembers his broad shoulders edging out opponents in rec league basketball games. Now they are a hallmark of muscle atrophy, which has stolen 40 pounds from his frame.
Sean Heldt, bedridden in a rehabilitation facility, is in a coma, four weeks after a drunken, wrong-way driver on Interstate 90 hit his Chevrolet Lumina head-on.
Doctors don't give his mother much hope. But Heldt still talks to her 24-year-old son, clinging to the idea that her love gets through the tubes and casts that cover him.
"When he wakes up, we don't know if he'll remember us," she said. "I don't know if I'm going to get my son back."
Sean Heldt is one of the drunken-driving victims rarely heard about -- people permanently scarred, gravely injured or clinging to life with crushing medical bills. ...
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