NORTH BEND - The day that changed Kyle Thomas' life is mostly lost from his memory.

His mom, Debra Thomas, has the opposite problem. She will never forget that day, especially the call telling her to rush to Eugene's Sacred Heart Medical Center.

"They said hurry up because he might not make it," she recalls.

What happened to Kyle Thomas on July 2, 2007, nearly cost him his life. But he didn't die. To the delight of his mother, he became a role model.

Thomas was a 20-year-old high-school dropout, working at Totally Cellular in the Pony Village Mall. It was a nice July day, so he decided to go drinking with friends at Loon Lake.

Alcohol already had gotten him into trouble. He had racked up drinking citations and a drunken driving charge. He was drunk again as he stood atop a waterfall, trying to impress a girl by leaning over the edge.

It wasn't a sheer wall, but rather a series of steps, Thomas said. So when he fell, he bounced from rock to rock, rather than hurtling directly to the bottom.

"That's probably why I survived," he said.

Another lucky break: An off-duty medic was nearby with a carry board in his vehicle. By the time a rescue helicopter arrived, Thomas was strapped in and ready to fly.

Debra Thomas was at work when she got the call. As she hurried to Eugene, she recalled her argument with her son earlier in the day. She had complained that he looked grungy. Now she wondered if that would be their last conversation.

At Sacred Heart, doctors told her Kyle had sustained a diffuse axonal injury - widespread damage to both sides of his brain.

Dr. Bryan Andresen, medical director of the Oregon Rehabilitation Center at Sacred Heart, said such injuries are common in falls and car accidents. A hard jolt can stretch or even snap nerve cells in the brain. Resulting inflammation can cause further damage.

Among patients who lose consciousness, 90 percent don't wake up, Andresen said. Those who do often have functional problems.

Those were the odds facing Kyle Thomas. He spent about a week in a coma. After he woke up, doctors advised Debra Thomas to look into a group home for her son.

She refused to think her son wouldn't recover.

"I always believed he would come back," she said.

He spent a week in intensive care unit, and more than a month at the hospital.

Though he has no memory of the accident, he remembers his hospital stay. It was frustrating, he said. Although he couldn't speak for several weeks, he thought he was talking.

"I was pretty upset they weren't listening to me," he recalled.

Debra Thomas kept a journal to help her cope. It became a chronicle of his progress.

On July 19, about two weeks after the accident, Thomas stood up. Two days later he took a few steps. On July 27, as she pushed his wheelchair, he spoke his first words in nearly a month.

"I'm tired of getting pushed around," he whispered. The way he remembers it, he thought he was screaming.

Rehabilitation filled the following months. He worked on his balance. He spent hours fingering dimes and quarters, trying to add up their values.

He also spent time thinking about the implications of his survival. Before his accident, a friend who had excelled at school had died in a car accident.

"I asked myself, 'Why did he die and I wasn't doing anything?'"

His attitude about school changed. He enrolled at Southwestern Oregon Community College. After working with him to learn simple math concepts, Debra Thomas was amazed that he signed up for pre-calculus and thrived in the class.

"At first he can't make change, now he's doing math I can't comprehend," she said.

Instead of the D's and F's he routinely earned in high school, he's been getting A's and B's. During the winter term, he was named to the college dean's list with a 3.5 GPA.

"I don't know where my work ethic came from," he said. "Before I was such a lazy b- - - - - -."

He works part-time at the Safeway gas station. Balance problems still keep him from surfing, but he's been bicycling a lot, which seems to help. Now old enough to drink legally, he sometimes has a beer with friends. But he no longer binges.

He hopes to go to Oregon State University and major in computer science.

Debra Thomas is proud of her son's accomplishments. She also uses his story as motivation for the inmates at Shutter Creek Correctional Institution, where she's a life skills teacher. She tells them that if her son can turn his life around, so can they.

"I know there are people who haven't been that lucky," she said. "But if you care about somebody, you take it a day at a time."