SOUTH KINGSTOWN

Sylvia Bogusz still writes poetry, but the words don’t come as easily. Right-handed for 17 years, she scrawls letters with a shaky left hand. “My thoughts are scattered,” says Bogusz, whose body was hurled 100 feet when a driver hit her 10 months ago.

Her doctors thought she would die. The speeding car ripped her brain tissue, cracked her liver, fractured her lower spine and pelvis, broke her upper arm and thigh bone and tore two arteries that carry blood to her brain. Doctors also discovered a “hangman’s fracture” –– an injury found in people who are hanged.

At Rhode Island Hospital, Bogusz slipped into a coma, breathed through a tube and did not talk for months. But last week she testified at the State House in favor of several bills that would strengthen the state’s drunken-driving laws.

The police say the woman who hit her was drunk.

“I was so nervous,” says Bogusz, who “wobbles like a penguin” and walks with a cane. Still, she wanted to tell lawmakers what had happened to her. “I said, ‘I have a traumatic brain injury and I’ve had major surgery.’ ”

When she couldn’t finish, her mother, Grazyna Chylinska, spoke. Too many people are being hurt or killed by drivers who drink, she said. Police Lt. Gerald Richard –– who worked on her daughter’s case –– was also struck by a drunken driver, she said. “We want to prevent other families from going through this.”

“Most of the time, these drunken drivers are repeat offenders, and they don’t care,” says Sen. Leonidas Raptakis, D-Coventry, one of several lawmakers looking to punish drinkers through tougher laws, including longer license suspensions.

Raptakis wants Bogusz to speak at other State House hearings. “Her testimony is powerful.”

Before the accident, Bogusz studied Italian at South Kingstown High School. She graduated last June and, a day later, started classes at the University of Rhode Island. She dreamed of traveling through Europe as a businesswoman.

Now, she can’t remember a word of Italian. Her goals have changed, too.

“I want to be a judge,” she says. “If someone does something wrong, I won’t let them go. I’ll be strict.”

BOGUSZ REMEMBERS little about the day she nearly died.

On June 23, she and her friends drove to the Narragansett town beach, a favorite haunt. Later, at a friend’s house in South Kingstown, she discovered she had missed her 10 p.m. curfew. But on the drive home she hit a curb and slashed two tires.

It was after midnight when she pulled into the southbound breakdown lane on Route 1, put on her emergency light and stood on the grassy shoulder. She called her mom, who lives five minutes away.

Around the same time Heidi L. Harrall, driving fast, tried to pass a car, swerved across the highway and slammed into Bogusz, the police say. Witnesses say Bogusz bounced three times on the highway.

Last month, a Washington County grand jury indicted Harrall, 45, of South Kingstown, of driving under the influence and driving to endanger. In Superior Court, Harrall pleaded not guilty to the charges but admitted to a District Court judge that she was a probation violator. She’ll appear in court again next month.

Bogusz recalls nothing about the accident. Her mother remembers everything.

Chylinska says she reached Bogusz shortly after her distress call. When she saw cars parked along the road she thought someone had stopped to help her daughter change her tires. Instead, she found Bogusz in the middle of Route 1, her body shaking. Chylinska began screaming at the oncoming cars, trying to keep them from away her daughter.

Rescue workers took Bogusz to Rhode Island Hospital, where surgeon Hieu Ton-That packed gauze pads around her liver to try to stop the bleeding.

“She was very near death,” says Charles Adams, acting chief of trauma surgery and critical care. The teenager’s blood pressure was extremely low and her blood, lacking hemoglobin, was a candy red. There was blood in her brain, too. She was cold.

Adams told Chylinska that her daughter would probably bleed to death in the intensive-care unit.

BUT BOGUSZ LIVED.

“Being 17 really helped,” says Adams. An older patient would not have survived the injuries, blood loss and shock, he says. “To say it’s a miracle she lived is an understatement.”

Bogusz got a little better, but a raging infection sent her back into shock, says Adams, who took out part of her colon and drained fluid and pus from her belly.

Other doctors helped, too.

“She was critical for a number of weeks,” says Dr. Benjamin Christian, a resident and surgeon. At one point she had a perforated bowel. Then she got pneumonia. “We were managing her very closely, hour by hour.”

To keep her from moving, the doctors placed her head in a halo, a device with a hard strip that cradles the forehead and attaches to a lower vest and to bars on each side of the head.

They took an MRI of her brain. Chylinska looked at the pictures and gasped. She saw dark spots.

Huge areas of her brain were “stroked out and dead,” says Adams, who told Chylinska that her daughter would never be the same.

Once her infections eased, the doctors drained fluid from Bogusz’s brain and –– for the first time in months –– she started talking in complete sentences.

Before then, she said the same thing over and over: Hi. Hi. Hi.

Now she spoke to her brother, Sebastian. He called his mother, who was resting in another room.

“Can you say momma?” asked Chylinska.

“Momma,” Bogusz said.

AFTER FOUR MONTHS at Rhode Island Hospital, Bogusz went to the Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital in Boston, which specializes in brain and spinal cord injuries.

Then, a month ago, she came home.

Bogusz still faces months of therapy, but on Aspen Road she smiles easily and plays with her new dog, Valentina. The Belgian shepherd is a gift from her brother.

But she can’t drive because her right hand won’t work. She still has a huge bruise on her right thigh. She needs help with the steps to the family home. Her mother gently washes her dark hair.

“I miss drawing, driving, writing poetry and going to the beach whenever I want to,” says Bogusz, her long hair chopped short because of a shunt that drains fluid from her brain. The shunt, hard to see, is just behind her right ear.

While in the hospital in Boston, Bogusz turned 18; she made place mats and decorated her poems with blue and purple crayons. Sometimes she wrote about toucans, seagulls and blue skies.

But in a poem called “Untitled,” she wrote about her struggle to move her wrist and hand so she could create art.

Her mother keeps it with the others by her daughter, some written before the accident.

“I want my hand to move,” says Bogusz in the short poem. Her neck, she writes, “Hurts like a knife.”

The poem ends abruptly:

“Why did this happen to me?”

pdavis@projo.com