SOUTH KINGSTOWN — When Grazyna Chylinska answered the phone early Saturday, she heard her daughter’s worried voice. It was after midnight and Sylvia was stranded on Route 1 with a flat tire.

Sylvia Bogusz

Sylvia said she was afraid someone would hit her car on the dark highway near the Charlestown line. So she left the car in the breakdown lane and waited in the grass nearby for her mother.

Chylinska, a divorced mother of two, drove the five-minute stretch from her Green Hill home to the highway.

Her daughter, who graduated from South Kingstown High School on June 18, had already enrolled in three summer courses at the University of Rhode Island. To celebrate Sylvia’s accomplishments, the family went to dinner at an area restaurant that night.

“Do I look beautiful?” Sylvia Bogusz asked during dinner.

“Yes,” her mother said, “of course you do.”

Now, on Route 1, Chylinska spotted her daughter in a southbound lane of traffic, bleeding and unconscious. Only a few minutes before, an alleged drunken driver had lost control of her car and struck Sylvia, breaking her bones and throwing her more than 100 feet.

“I stood in the middle of the road and tried to slow down the traffic. I didn’t want a car to run over my baby,” Chylinska said yesterday. “I was just five minutes away. If I had the power to fly, I could have flown to her and lifted her and saved her,” she sobbed.

Chylinska spent yesterday morning resting at her Aspen Road home. Unable to sleep well since the accident, she needed to rest, she said.

The day before, she had cried in District Court as Heidi L. Harrall — the 45-year-old woman charged with hitting her daughter — was arraigned on felony charges of driving under the influence resulting in serious injury and driving with reckless disregard for the safety of others. The police said Harrall, who was held without bail on a previous charge, had been traveling at 90 miles an hour when she lost control of her 1994 Audi.

Yesterday, Sylvia was scheduled to undergo surgery on her arm. The college student suffered a head injury, a broken right arm and leg, and a broken pelvis and vertebrae, Chylinska said.

As of last night, she was listed in serious condition at Rhode Island Hospital.

When Sylvia was flown by helicopter to the Providence hospital on Saturday, the doctors told her family “to expect the worse,” her father, Kaz, said.

But that night, Sylvia opened her eyes. The next day, she cried and squeezed the finger of her 22-year-old brother, Sebastian.

Sylvia’s friends also showed up, bringing cards, flowers and toys. Patrolman Montafix Houghton, a school resource officer, has been praying for Sylvia’s recovery at the hospital every day, Chylinska said.

The mother is now asking everyone but the family to stay home because Sylvia’s blood pressure has soared. She is still listed in serious condition.

“All we want people to do now is to pray,” she said. “The flowers … I’m not capable of caring for flowers right now.”

As a little girl, Sylvia didn’t play with Barbie dolls. She preferred her brother’s metal cars and Lego pieces. “As a baby, she always had something in her hand — a lipstick, perfume, a pen, a notebook,” Chylinska said.

In high school, she did well. The B student loved Italian and science and decided to go to URI to study international business, her mother said.

But the death of several friends troubled Sylvia her senior year. And she was worried about her mother, who quit her job as a bank teller because of a stressful incident.

To help her deal with bouts of depression, Sylvia gave her mother — born in a Polish city near Warsaw — a big coffee-table book about Pope John Paul II. One of the pages contained some papal advice: Be not afraid.

“Every day I bring this book to the hospital, because I believe in miracles,” Chylinska said. “My daughter is a strong lady with a big heart. She will survive.”

Sylvia plumbed her own feelings about the death of her friends in poems written in a small spiral notebook. She wrote about thunder and lightning and rain and hail. On one page she wrote the lines, “Why is life full of sharp turns? Why do obstacles come unexpected?”

pdavis@projo.com