DiRaimo gets a hug from her niece Karen Mather, 4, as all the sisters gather for Thanksgiving.

The Providence Journal / Glenn Osmundson

Angela DiRaimo had witnessed more than her share of tragedies involving children during 10 years as a nurse in a pediatric intensive care unit at Rhode Island Hospital.

But tiny Ia Yang touched her heart in a way no other patient ever had.

Ia had suffered a broken neck when her family’s car was struck by a drunk driver on a snowy December nightmore than 20 years ago.

She’d been standing on the back seat of the car, leaning over into the front, when their car was struck broadside a few blocks from their apartment in South Providence.

Her father, a Laotian refugee and jewelry maker, died in the crash. Her mother, who was five months pregnant, was hospitalized with minor injuries. Her baby brother, who was apparently in a car seat, wasn’t hurt at all.

Ia was found crumpled under the dashboard of the car, limp as a rag doll.

Xrays showed a fracture between her sixth and seventh vertebrae, that paralyzed her from the chest down. She’d also suffered a terrible concussion, leaving her comatose and non-responsive.

Doctors didn’t expect Ia to live.

Angela DiRaimo happened to be working that night, and she was assigned to care for the baby — which meant she’d be her primary care nurse for as long as Ia was in the hospital.

DiRaimo remembers looking at the toddler, hooked up to a scary collection of life support machines designed to keep her heart beating and her lungs breathing. In fact, her heart stopped beating several times that night.

She was so tiny and fragile that DiRaimo remembers thinking: “We have to work together to save her.”

And they did.

But she never dreamed she’d one day take Ia home to join her family.

FAST-FORWARD 23 YEARS and Ia, who changed her name to Mia, is about to celebrate Christmas with her adoptive parents, Angela and Raymond DiRaimo, and her five sisters, Deborah, Judith, Theresa, Karen and Sharon.

The sisters and their families are now scattered around New England, but close enough to descend on the DiRaimo’s tiny ranch-style house on the Cranston-Warwick line for the traditional Christmas Eve Feast of the Seven Fishes.

Okay, so they only do six fish dishes. But there’s still plenty of food to cover the three folding tables lined up in the finished basement, where four generations of DiRaimos will gather.

Mia will be in the thick of things — rolling around in her motorized wheelchair, socializing with the grownups, playing with her 16 nieces and nephews, and holding those little ones who are afraid of Grandpa when he dresses up as Santa to hand out the toys.

She seems intensely quiet and shy to outsiders, but to the DiRaimo family, she’s just one of the girls.

Since she’s the only one still living home with her parents, she has commandeered her siblings’ former bedroom on the first floor as an office and storage area — she has so many clothes that her parents had to buy two huge plastic storage bags to serve as extra closets.

She also set up her own office in the basement, where the walls are lined with the nearly two dozen playbills from productions she has seen — mostly during trips to New York City through the Community College of Rhode Island or with her mother, who’s always game for a day trip. The basement office features her office equipment and books, as well as her computer, for when she eventually gets a job.

She says she hopes to be some sort of writer, maybe even a theater critic. But for now, she’d be happy with virtually any kind of job.

But getting a job is no easy feat for someone whose paralysis means she relies on her parents for everything from getting in and out of bed to getting from here to there.

But she has also proven she’s ready for a challenge. She has already earned two college degrees — a bachelor’s degree in English from Rhode Island College this past spring and an associate degree from CCRI.

She also has two high school diplomas — one from Cranston High School West and one from the Cranston Vocational Technical High School, where she took courses in office management while completing her high school degree.

But she still can’t find anyone to hire her. Once they hear about her situation, she says, they tell her the job isn’t suitable for her.

So she’s planning to head back to school next month, in a graduate program at the University of Rhode Island.

Her parents hope the extra degree — and additional time — will help her land a job that will provide her with the independence she’ll need to survive on her own in years to come.

But in the meantime, they’re so proud of all she’s done.

It’s a miracle, they say, given that she wasn’t supposed to live at all

But she’s had her guardian angels looking over her.

Their names are Angela and Raymond DiRaimo.

“They are,” Mia says, “two wonderful, excellent people who I couldn’t live without.”

THE DIRAIMOS HAD LIVED a modest but comfortable life before Mia joined their family, with Raymond working as a truck driver for D’Ambra Construction and Angela working as a nurse while raising their five daughters.

Angela had been a nurse for about 20 years before Mia’s case came along, including 10 years in the pediatric intensive care unit in what was then the Potters Unit of Rhode Island Hospital. It was challenging and rewarding, but it had terrifically sad moments — especially when it involved dealing with young children who were critically ill or injured.

All too many of them died.

But the staff always pulled together in a crisis, and that’s what they did the night of Dec. 19, 1984, when Mia was rushed to the hospital, barely clinging to life. The doctors stabilized her as best they could, but they didn’t hold much hope.

Mia’s mother didn’t speak English and didn’t really understand what was happening, Angela DiRaimo recalled. In Southeast Asia at the time, no child would have survived an accident like this, and the Hmong culture would not have approved of all the life support measures, she said. Her mother also wasn’t physically or financially able to bear the burden of a severely handicapped baby, DiRaimo said. So eventually, Ia became a ward of the state.

Meanwhile, Mia lay in a coma, unresponsive, for weeks and then months on end. But nearly every day, Angela DiRaimo would be there to care for her — cleaning her, checking her breathing and feeding tubes, and talking to Ia, sure she was listening, even if she never did show any signs.

“She would just lay there,” Angela DiRaimo recalled. “But I just got this sense from her, that she could sense when I was there.”

That changed about five months into her hospital stay.

ANGELA DIRAIMO had taken a two-week vacation and when she came back, Mia opened her eyes and smiled at the sound of her voice.

DiRaimo gasped, then ran to tell everyone. “But nobody believed me… They thought I was just imagining it,” she said. And when they came to see for themselves, Mia never opened her eyes. “She would smile only for me,” DiRaimo said.

It became a game of sorts, so DiRaimo had to bring her camera to take a picture to prove she wasn’t hallucinating. Looking back, she thinks Mia was probably conscious far more quickly than the doctors and nurses realized.

Pretty soon, hospital officials decided she was strong enough to send to Children’s Hospital in Boston for rehabilitation to see whether any more could be done to improve Mia’s condition. She was considered an “incomplete quadriplegic” who had some use of her hands and arms, but not very much.

The folks in Boston quickly determined they couldn’t do much more for her, so Mia returned to Rhode Island Hospital, where she would spend another year or so.

The problem was, she didn’t really need to be in the hospital. So a social worker for the state Department for Children, Youth and Families began looking for a foster home or nursing center for kids that could provide skilled care for her intensive medical needs. But there were no openings for a child like Mia, and her social worker was running out of ideas.

SO HE SUGGESTED that DiRaimo become a foster parent for Mia. At first, she dismissed the idea. But the more she thought about it, she realized Mia didn’t belong in a nursing home. She was physically disabled, but mentally strong.

She belonged in a home, with a loving family.

DiRaimo was torn. She already had five children, then ages 14 to 19, including twins. She had to work to support her family. But she’d never had a patient like Mia before, one who truly had nowhere to go.

The social worker from DCYF kept pushing, gently. He also knew Mia needed a special place. He assured DiRaimo she’d get financial help from the state to provide for Mia’s care.

So she asked her husband. What did he think?

He didn’t think twice. He immediately agreed to invite Mia to join their family.

Their girls loved the idea of a new sister, Raymond DiRaimo said. He recalled the first time he met her. “She didn’t weigh 20 pounds, the little thing. My heart went out to her.”

He remembers how he and his daughters went to the hospital over a period of weeks to meet Mia, and spent hours wheeling her around the hospital as they got to know her, to make sure this was the right decision for everyone.

They agreed: It was.

The nurses at the hospital threw Angela DiRaimo a baby shower instead of a retirement party, before she and her husband brought Mia home on Sept. 17, 1986.

What a trip that was, Raymond DiRaimo said. “My God, you should have seen her riding home in that car, like it was the first time she’d seen anything.” He recalled how Mia just stared out the window at the sky, the clouds, the trees, the buildings, the cars, the people. She was still nonverbal, but grunted and pointed and soaked in the surroundings, and didn’t want the ride to end.

THE DIRAIMOS SHOWERED her with love, but quickly realized there was so much more that she needed — from a kid-sized wheelchair to special devices to monitor her breathing during the night.

Ia, who was only 3 1/2, at that point was still technically a ward of the state. But DCYF didn’t offer much help, so the DiRaimos scrambled to get Mia what she’d need.

Mia moving in meant a huge change for the entire DiRaimo family, but they took everything in stride, facing each new challenge — from getting her started at Rhode Island’s Meeting Street School, which helps children with disabilities, to having her tested for admission into the Cranston public schools, where she was quickly mainstreamed to join other kids in regular classes.

She had birthday and Halloween parties, and went out with friends. The DiRaimos treated her like any other kid, which was fine with Mia. Her birth mother visited occasionally at first; over time, the visits dwindled and ceased. Then her birth mother moved and gave up parental rights. The DiRaimos formally adopted her when she was 12.

And that’s when she asked to change her name from Ia to Mia.

THE DiMAIOS HAVE TRIED to make life as normal as they could for a young woman who was heavily reliant on a wheelchair and dependent on her parents for everything from bathing and dressing to getting in and out of bed.

But with her electric wheelchair, which she operates with a stick shift, she has been able to get around — whether gliding up the aisle during her graduation ceremonies at Rhode Island College this past spring or heading out to Garden City or the Providence Place mall, filling those portable closets at her home with designer clothes at bargain-basement prices.

Of course, it’s still a challenge getting from one locale to the other. She usually relies on a ride from her parents in their 2002 Chevy Suburban, which has a wheelchair lift. In fact, the whole house is outfitted for wheelchairs and slings — including tracks on the living room ceiling that let her move from a wheelchair to a regular chair for family get-togethers, the ramp leading to the driveway and the back of the house, and the door into the finished basement, which, like all the doorways in the house, had to be widened.

The DiRaimos worry about what will happen to Mia in the future, if she can’t find a job to support herself and pay for the care she’ll need to remain independent. She can’t even receive public assistance to buy a handicapped van, because she doesn’t have a job. But she needs the van to get a job. That is typical, the DiRaimos said, of the obstacles they have faced and learned to overcome over the years. But more important, Mia will need enough money to pay for people to do what the DiRaimos have lovingly done for years — helping get her out of bed and showered and dressed and fed. After that, Mia does most everything else on her own.

Mia admits that sometimes, she wonders how different her life could have been if not for the accident. “How I wish I was strapped into that seat” in her family’s car. And there are times that she feels sorry for herself, thinking: “Why did this happen to me?” But, she quickly added: “Then again, there are a lot of people who are far worse off than I am.”

In fact, that’s when she realizes how lucky she is to have been adopted by the DiRaimos. “If I wasn’t with my mom and dad right now, I would probably be in a foster home or a group home and I wouldn’t be as far as I am right now.”

EVERY DAY, every accomplishment, is another gift, Angela DiRaimo said. “I’m just amazed she’s done so well.… To think when I first took her home that she didn’t have much longer to live.”

Veronica Bruscini, a Rhode Island College senior who met Mia when they were both students at CCRI, isn’t surprised at how far Mia has come. “She never lets anything stop her.” In fact, Bruscini said, “If somebody tells her she can’t do something, she’ll make it her mission to prove them wrong.”

Bruscini, who lives in Warwick and is one of Mia’s closest friends, said she’s amazed at all that Mia has done and all that plans to do — whether hopping in Bruscini’s car for a night out with dinner and a movie, or dreaming of becoming a theater critic. She believes that Mia has drawn much of her strength and determination over the years from her family. “Her parents and her family are incredibly strong people. They have a lot of love in their hearts, and a lot of strength and a lot of courage to open their home to her.”

And now, at 24 and looking toward her future as an adult, Mia is showing that strength and courage, Bruscini said. “God only knows where she’s going to go (in the future), but she’s got the strength to do it.”

lkirk@projo.com