By BRIAN C. JONES

Journal Staff Writer

By the time Lynne Evans-Stone came home that Sunday, her answering machine was choked with messages.

The first voice was from New Mexico. Her daughter was in a hospital, gravely ill. The voice said that Evans-Stone and her ex-husband needed to get there in a hurry.

Almost immediately, there was a commotion at her front door. Neighbors said the Cranston police had been going house to house, trying to find her, so she could contact New Mexico authorities.

Half a continent away, in the tiny town of Española, New Mexico, 18-year-old Morgan Lynne Stone was in a coma.

She was hooked by tubes to a breathing machine and the other lifesaving devices of a technological age. Morgan's college roommate and friends were gathered around her.

Even as Evans-Stone and Morgan's father, Walter R. Stone, a Rhode Island lawyer, flew toward the Southwest, even as Morgan's friends stood their hospital vigil, all who knew Morgan found it hard to comprehend the catastrophe.

Morgan had not been in an automobile accident. She had not been the victim of some bizarre shooting, or been trapped in a dormitory fire, stalked by some escaped death-row inmate or any of the thousand things parents imagine when their children go off to college.

None of those nightmares, nothing dramatic, nothing to write a headline about.

Morgan Stone had just had an asthma attack.

ASTHMA IS a familiar disease, maybe too much so for the good of everyone affected.

Many people know somebody with asthma, but often they pass off their suffering as the whining of hypochondriacs, or ploys to get out of gym class.

Even the 17 million people in the United States who have the affliction don’t always take it seriously. Some hope that it will fade away like some annoying childhood disease; or they ignore it, tiring of the medicines and clumsy devices needed to handle it.

But asthma can be a killer.

Every year, about 5,000 people die from asthma nationally — 10 to 15 of them in Rhode Island. These are deaths uncomfortable to imagine. During an attack, hundreds of tubes in the lungs narrow, strangled by tightening muscles and inflamed tissues, clogged with thick mucus, starving the body of oxygen. In effect, these children and adults suffocate to death.

But death is the exception.

Most people have mild cases, which with proper care and attention, allow them to live relatively untroubled lives.

Others are merely slowed or interrupted by the disease. Asthma is a big reason why children miss school and why workers call in sick. The treatment of the disease costs nearly $10 billion a year, and the time lost to asthma attacks costs industry almost $3 billion.

And, of course, there are numbers of near-misses: people who are rushed — gasping, choking and vomiting — to hospital emergency rooms, where they are brought back to normal by medical wizardry and modern drugs.

At the same time, the incidence of the disease is spreading, even as more money and research are thrown into it.

Nobody knows why.

One theory is that our society has become so antiseptic that bodies can’t build good physical defenses against some of the things that prompt asthma attacks. Conversely, there’s speculation that our dirtier environment is to blame.

There is also worry about the indoor environment, where people spend more of their time with such innocuous threats as the nation’s number one pet, the cat, and wall-to-wall carpeting.

Cat hair and the hidden filth in carpeting are among the numerous ‘‘triggers’’ that can set off asthma attacks.

Also, the disease is especially prevalent in urban centers, and among some minority groups — African-Americans and some Hispanic groups are hard hit.

But perhaps the most astonishing fact about asthma is that it is almost entirely treatable.

Asthma triggers can be identified. Drugs can quell a sudden attack; daily doses of medicine often can reduce the chances of one happening.

So nothing terrible has to happen to most people who have asthma. Most of the deaths can be prevented.

If only asthmatics would stay away from cats and other things that set them off.

If only they’d take their medicine.

IF YOU WERE picking teams, you’d choose Morgan Stone.

You’d want her on your debating squad. Ask her to represent your school at a conference. Bring her to the Heritage Ball as your date. Have her coach her younger classmates in gym.

‘‘You would be bowled over, you would say: ‘Who is this young woman?’ ’’ says Joan Countryman, head of Lincoln School, the prestigious private school on Providence’s East Side.

Countryman met Morgan when she was in the sixth grade, and Countryman was visiting an English class, where she happened to read a rather abstract poem to the students.

Morgan immediately started asking questions. When Countryman thought about that later, she was astonished.

‘‘I read a poem about infinity, and pretty soon, I was in deep conversation with a child about a number of lines: eternity, and the nature of infinity,’’ Countryman says.

This was a girl who had an active mind, a range of talents and a unique and beguiling way of approaching the world.

‘‘If she was in a room with artists, she would talk about art,’’ says Evans-Stone, her mother. ‘‘If she was in a room with philosophers, she would talk about philosophy. If she was in a room with chefs, she would talk about food and be very comfortable and knowledgeable.’’

Then there was the other Morgan Stone.

The one who hated homework.

Her parents, teachers and friends all describe Morgan’s high school persona in the same way: a talented extrovert who happened to be maddeningly undisciplined.

‘‘From a very little girl, she just pretty much did what she wanted to do,’’ says Evans-Stone. ‘‘Even though I might have thought I was in charge, most of the time, I was not.’’

Morgan’s talents, versus her work habits, created a wonderful, exasperating whirlpool of expectations and frustrations for those charged with cheering and nagging her.

‘‘She was very interested in philosophy, and she would sit and read Plato from cover to cover in a day,’’ her mother says. ‘‘But she couldn’t turn in a two-page essay on an assignment for English until her back was against the wall.’’

As a little girl, she took dance and tap lessons on the possibility that she might want to be a ballerina, and then went on to guitar lessons; she could paint — and paint well — but never seemed to appreciate that as anything unusual. There didn’t seem to be a limit to what fascinated her.

Her best friend at Lincoln, Heather Zienowicz, says that Morgan was a person to whom others turned for advice, the self-confident one who always seemed to have a solution.

Morgan certainly had turned Heather’s life around.

When Heather first started going to Lincoln in the seventh grade, she was so painfully shy that she would bring a book on the school bus, just so she could read and not have to talk to anyone.

One day she grabbed the wrong book, about dog grooming. Her busmate, Morgan Stone, leaned over, and, ever-curious, began grilling her about whether it was a good book and what dog grooming was about.

Their friendship blossomed. Not only did they live near each other, they also had been born the same day — June 24, 1982 — and in the same place, Women & Infants Hospital. They joked that they’d been in adjoining bassinets.

‘‘She gave me a chance to open up,’’ Heather says, describing herself as the opposite personality from the one Morgan first encountered — if not an extrovert, an outgoing woman at ease in public speaking.

But by eighth grade, it looked as though the Morgan Stone who hated homework was going to flunk out.

So Joan Countryman took her on as her own ‘‘advisee’’ and hauled her and her parents into the last place a private-school girl wants to be: the head-of-school’s office.

‘‘You are not going to survive, unless you shape up,’’ Countryman said in her sternest headmistress voice. Morgan did get her homework in. But at the last moment and only after a lot of ‘‘reminding.’’

That was the pattern, touch and go.

Countryman recalls needing a new window in one of her office doors. She wanted to replace the clear glass with something that would give her more privacy. Morgan, then in 11th grade, got the job.

Morgan was working with stained glass in art class, and she came up with a design, got the materials and started putting them together. But by 12th grade, it still wasn’t finished.

‘‘I started to say: ‘Morgan, when am I going to get the glass?’ ’’ Countryman recalls. Morgan would say something about a small part being broken.

‘‘It took a long time, maybe a year longer, and she suddenly produced it.’’

The window shows three daisies, the Lincoln School symbol that graduates carry at commencement, set among green leaves and a sea of wavy glass that provides both light and privacy.

‘‘I think it is spectacular!’’ Countryman says.

ASTHMA IS the body doing what it’s sometimes supposed to do — but massively overdoing it — says Dr. Charles B. Sherman.

The lungs sense that foreign bodies are present, and they put up the ‘‘keep out’’ and ‘‘get out signs.’’

An associate professor of medicine at Brown University, with a private practice in pulmonary care, Sherman works closely with the American Lung Association in Rhode Island.

‘‘Whenever people without asthma breathe in some irritants, the airways tend to narrow, and that’s a good thing,’’ Sherman says. ‘‘With asthma, you have the system running amuck, so that you have the airways contracting when they really don’t need to.’’

Think of the lungs as upside-down trees, he says. Thick windpipes branch out to smaller and smaller networks of airways or tubes in both lungs.

When some irritant shows up, the airways become inflamed, muscles twitch and contract, and mucus clogs the openings that are left. The person starts to cough, wheeze and have shortness of breath.

There are two major defenses.

One is to stay away from the various irritants or conditions that produce asthmatic episodes. Animal hair, temperature changes, cigarette smoke and cockroach droppings are among common ‘‘triggers.’’

The other way to fight it is to take medicines that can calm an attack — often administered with pocket-sized inhalers. There are also other drugs usually taken at least daily that can help avoid or tame attacks over the long run.

But asthma can be sneaky. Many people experience only occasional attacks, and that lulls them into being careless or forgetful of both drugs and avoidance techniques.

‘‘Asthmatics are notorious for not always taking the medicines that they should,’’ Sherman says, ‘‘because sometimes they feel well.’’

Who can blame someone for not wanting to take pills, or breathe in medicines fired out of inhalers or shot into plastic tubes called ‘‘spacers’’ so they can be breathed in more completely?

It’s especially hard on children and teenagers, who don’t relish the idea of having to leave a party early, whipping out a spacer during a heavy date, or even having to believe that they won’t live forever.

MORGAN STONE came to the Providence offices of Dr. Donald E. Klein when she was about 8. Her mother explained that when Morgan was around cats, dogs and other animals, she would wheeze and have red, itchy eyes.

Klein’s tests quickly revealed that she was ‘‘a highly allergic individual.’’

And Morgan’s mother understood exactly what Klein was saying. Evans-Stone and her daughter both were asthmatics. Evans-Stone knew how alarming this business could be.

One day she was driving in a car of a friend who owned horses. The heater was blasting warm air, and at one moment, it apparently fired a horse hair directly into Evans-Stone’s eye.

‘‘Within seconds, my eye looked like this,’’ Evans Stone says, pointing to an apple on her kitchen table. ‘‘It was closed, completely. And there wasn’t anything I could do.’’

Walter Stone, Morgan’s father, recalls taking a young Morgan to a horse farm in Portsmouth, where either the hay or the horses triggered an attack. Morgan didn’t have her inhaler with her. Stone drove her in a hurry to a chain drugstore outlet, where he used all of his lawyerly tools of persuasion to get the druggist to provide the prescription medicine.

Heather Zienowicz, Morgan’s best friend, saw firsthand both how frightened she was of the illness, and how determined she was not to let it slow her down.

Heather had cats at her house, but Morgan would insist on visiting anyway.

Predictably, the allergy-asthma chain reaction would begin.

‘‘She didn’t always tell me,’’ Heather says. ‘‘She didn’t want me to feel guilty.’’

Sometimes, Morgan would call her boyfriend to drive her home; sometimes Heather would take her. Sometimes Morgan’s breathing would become so labored and difficult that she would start to cry.

Overall, however, Dr. Klein and her parents say that Morgan seemed to be a mild asthmatic, the kind who can get by avoiding obvious asthma triggers and using inhalers when her lungs seemed to be acting up.

When asthmatics rely on inhalers a lot, as Morgan sometimes did, doctors may advise them to take drugs that can control the medicine over time.

Klein urged his young patient to take such ‘‘controller’’ medicines. But Morgan seemed to have no more patience for regular doses of medicine than she did for her nightly school assignments. Which made her a typical young patient.

‘‘Morgan was very much a free spirit, and like most adolescents, she never did what I recommended,’’ Klein says Evans-Stone could feel the disease in her own body; and she could see the success of the latest medicine that Klein had recommended for both of them.

So when Morgan went off last fall to the College of Santa Fe, her mother stayed on her case.

‘‘I did preach about her taking the medicine, constantly, from the time she went to Santa Fe and I left her there. When I talked to her on the phone: ‘Morgan, you’ve got to take your medicine; you are going to have to take it every day. It really works, if you would take it every day.’ ’’

At the same time, those who knew Morgan admired her determination to live her life unshackeled.

She traveled to Scotland with her school choir; went on ski trips; visited California; she was good at field hockey and basketball.

‘‘Asthma never stopped Morgan from doing anything,’’ Evans-Stone says.

MORGAN COUGHED constantly, says Emilé Marchick, her roommate at the 1,600-studentcollege.

Sometimes Emilé would help her new friend hunt for her inhalers. Emilé, 18, worried about her roommate, and could see that her life in New Mexico took its toll. Their friends smoked cigarettes and the thin air in Santa Fe’s high altitude seemed harsh even to her.

But it was Morgan the extrovert, Morgan the life-of-the-party, Morgan the explorer of Santa Fe’s art galleries that most impressed Emilé, who believed that the Fates had brought them together.

‘‘Probably her most magnificent — why so many people remember her — is because she had this laugh, like she was a LOUD person for sure,’’ Emilé says. ‘‘She had this laugh that was, like, contagious and made people, other people, laugh.

‘‘Guys would sculpt her, and she did nude modeling once,’’ Emilé says. ‘‘She was very womanly, and she was very confident with herself and made people feel good about themselves.’’

It was hard to think of her as someone with a chronic medical condition.

‘‘We had the best room,’’ Emilé says, ‘‘a really cool room, a party room, just like fun people.’’

On the door, the women hung a sign: ‘‘Enter into the Goddess Room;’’ they decorated the inside in deep blues and purples.

Morgan would persuade her friends to drive to a canyon an hour and a half outside Santa Fe, to look at the stars. And when they were back in the city, she would tour that art capital’s galleries, getting to know all the curators.

Fixed in Emilé’s mind was this snapshot of Morgan Stone when they went to another of New Mexico’s magical communities, Taos:

‘‘She had this, like purple, shimmery thing on, a blanket wrapped around her; she was sitting in this rocking chair, telling stories, and laughing. She was always telling stories, like, crazy stories that she picked up along the way.’’

DR. KLEIN describes what happens during a severe reaction for an allergic asthmatic.

‘‘Allergic individuals have a very specific antibody in their system,’’ he says. ‘‘This antibody sits on — I call them the ‘time bomb cells’ — the mast cells. And these mast cells contain agents, pharmacological agents, which have very definite effects.

‘‘It causes a chain reaction for the release of reactive pharmacological agents,’’ he says, ‘‘and these cause tremendous spasm of airways and also stimulate mucus secretions.

That’s why Klein says that the first defense for asthmatics whose attacks are triggered by specific allergens is to avoid them.

But Klein acknowledges that it’s hard for people to create an awkward social situation by leaving a party, or avoiding a friend, or otherwise shying away from allergic situations.

Further, according to experts at the Lung Association, over the years, asthmatics get used to their condition and develop a capacity to withstand the trauma when it’s going on.

Charles Sherman, the pulmonologist who works with the Lung Association, says patients will tell him they are feeling great, but when he examines them, he finds their lungs are terrible.

So when asthma is beginning to shut down the lungs, the person may not even realize it. Until it’s too late.

ON OCT. 14, Morgan went with a friend she had met the night before to a ranch in the 8,300-person town of Española, about 20 miles outside Santa Fe.

‘‘She was with a bunch of people . . . she was having like supposedly the best night,’’ says Emilé. She was laughing and loving every moment of it. She was on videotape and what not. And she was around hay . . . and she was, like, in a house with a bunch of cats.’’

At some point, Emilé was told later, Morgan complained of feeling ‘‘itchy.’’ She was having trouble breathing, and decided to take a shower, hoping that the warm, moist vapors would soothe her.

Suddenly, she burst from the shower, pleading with her companions to dial 911. And then she collapsed into the arms of her friends.

Morgan’s parents were told that paramedics from the Santa Fe County Fire Department arrived quickly. They found Morgan unconscious, her friends trying to revive her with CPR.

‘‘They came within minutes,’’ Evans-Stone says. ‘‘They were able to get her breathing again. But her heart stopped. And then her heart stopped again in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.’’

Emilé, who was in Taos, about an hour away, was called with word that her roommate was in the hospital. But because of privacy concerns, hard information was hard to come by.

Even the dean of students at the College of Santa Fe, Yvonne Russell, couldn’t learn much, except that the hospital was insistent on trying to get in touch with her family.

Dean Russel was impressed that Morgan’s friends insisted they see Morgan; Emilé and others raced to Española and a friendly night nurse let them be near her.

‘‘We got there, and they where like: ‘This girl is really sick,’ ’’ Emilé says. ‘‘She had tubes coming out of everywhere, she was just lying there, there was a breathing machine for her.’’

The friends took turns sitting with her in the cramped intensive care room.

The next day, when Morgan was moved to Presbyterian Hospital in Albuquerque, about an hour’s drive from Santa Fe, the friends followed her there.

By the time Walter Stone and Lynne Evans-Stone arrived, the hospital room was filled with pictures and decorations from her college dorm.

The friends rubbed lotion on Morgan’s legs and arms and talked to her and sang to her.

A doctor’s report was grim, Walter Stone says.

‘‘He told me that there was massive brain damage because of lack of oxygen, damage to the brain stem,’’ Stone says. ‘‘Normally, if you don’t see any reaction that is positive in the first five or six hours, it’s not going to get any better. ‘‘I looked at her,’’ Stone says. ‘‘The was no question of how bad it was.’’

Adds Evans-Stone: ‘‘They did everything possible to make sure.’’

On Oct. 17, three days after Morgan’s asthma attack, Emilé and her companions sensed their friend was slipping away and said their good-byes. Morgan died that afternoon.

A WAVE OF GRIEF swept across Rhode Island, where Morgan’s parents are well-known; Stone is a high-profile lawyer and Evans-Stone is a state worker, devoted to women’s and social causes. Photographs of Morgan had shown up in society pages, she had been quoted by a Journal political columnist when she attended the swearing-in of the state’s first black female Superior Court judge.

A memorial service was held at Brown University, where Morgan had been in a summer research apprenticeship program while she was in high school; a reception was held later in the downtown offices of the Rhode Island Foundation, where Walter Stone is on the board.

Lincoln School arranged for counselors to talk with students Morgan had befriended in the lower grades; pictures of her were placed in a trophy case outside Joan Countryman’s office. Parents flew their daughters to Providence from colleges throughout the country to be at the service of their Lincoln classmate.

During an afternoon and evening of calling hours, the line spilled out the doorway. When people would reach the Stones, they’d tell them the line was still around the corner. One of Evans-Stone’s relatives said it wasn’t just that she had seen grown men weeping, but so many men.

And in New Mexico, in the quadrangle formed by dormitories at the College of Santa Fe, about 200 people gathered in a large circle to sing and tell stories about Morgan Stone, whom they had known only about eight weeks.

One man brought a poster that Morgan had seen in his room and was always asking him to give to her. The students tried to dress in striking clothes, the way Morgan did, and Emilé read a poem she had composed when her roommate was dying.

They sang ‘‘Amazing Grace’’ and planted a crab apple tree — chosen for the Cancer astrological sign that Morgan and Emilé shared — in the college quadrangle.

The tree is thriving, Emilé said last month. It’s surviving a cold, snowy New Mexico winter, its bare, leafless limbs still decorated with beads, tiny stuffed animals and ribbons.