Keith Anderson concedes that the situations very easily could be reversed.

Kate Bishop could be in a wheelchair instead of going to jail for the car crash that crippled him. Anderson's friend, the driver of the car he was in, could be serving a lengthy sentence instead of the seven days he got for driving drunk.

And Anderson might still be walking the fairways at Salmon Falls Country Club in his hometown of Buxton.

After several surgeries, months of rehabilitation and a year and a half of stunning perseverance, Anderson has learned not to dwell on the misfortune that left him paralyzed from the chest down. Instead he counts his blessings.

Had the injury to his spine been an inch higher, he says, he would have suffered the almost total paralysis that afflicts actor Christopher Reeve.

"I can't really laugh good, but I can breathe on my own. I have the mobility of my arms and shoulders," Anderson says, flinging his arms out to either side as he sits in his wheelchair at the family's home in Buxton.

Bishop, a soccer mom with a spotless reputation, was sentenced last month to 18 months in jail for causing the accident that put Anderson in a wheelchair. Bishop's minivan rolled through a stop sign and into a Gorham intersection in June 2002. Her blood alcohol content was 0.25 - three times the legal limit.

The sentence ended the legal proceedings but the repercussions from the tragic crash continue - debilitating guilt for Bishop and financial and physical hardships for Anderson.

Anderson says he is past feeling sorry for himself. The handsome face that once landed him work with a Boston modeling agency breaks into a smile. "I'm still the same person, I'm just a little bit shorter."

The 22-year-old has always been cocky, a self-confidence that remains intact and has helped him cope with the physical and the psychological ordeal of losing the ability to walk. Seven months after he almost died, he returned to college in Rhode Island, graduating in December with a 3.5 average, and now seeks a job, possibly as a counselor helping others deal with life's setbacks.

Kate Bishop has been in counseling ever since the crash.

Bishop is 37, a devoted mother of three whose only legal trouble was a speeding ticket 14 years ago. She volunteered at her sons' elementary school in Portland and worked at a children's clothing store.

"Kate is such a caring person I cannot imagine anything more devastating than for her to have to comprehend that she played a part in someone else being badly hurt," said her husband, Greg Bishop. "She sits in a cell now and all she has are thoughts of the incident. Maybe that's a just punishment. I know it's the most excruciating thing for her."

What happened to Bishop could have happened to so many others. In 2002, the most recent year numbers were available, 6,817 people were arrested for drunken driving in Maine, according to the Department of Public Safety.

Kate Bishop had been out with friends on June 6, 2002, and over the course of five hours, she had seven glasses of wine. As her minivan approached the stop sign at the end of Route 237 in Gorham, she slowed but did not stop completely, and turned left onto Route 25.

Anderson and Kevin Bailey were headed home to Buxton in Bailey's Ford F-150 pickup after celebrating at Platinum Plus, a topless bar. Anderson had turned 21 the previous week. His license was under suspension from a drunken driving conviction in Scarborough.

When they left Platinum Plus, Bailey, who had been drinking shots of Crown Royal whiskey, was behind the wheel even though his blood alcohol content was twice the legal limit to drive.

Neither man was wearing a seat belt when their pickup truck and Bishop's minivan collided head-on.

Bailey was not speeding or driving erratically, according to witnesses, but he did not swerve to avoid the van as it crept into his lane. Anderson said he does not know whether they could have avoided the crash had they not been drinking that night.

The force of the crash snapped the fifth and sixth cervical vertebrae in Anderson's spine. Thankfully, he says, he remembers nothing of the collision.

His mother, Nancy Anderson, remembers getting the call from Maine Medical Center that night, "that horrible phone call, 'Do you have a son named Keith Anderson?' "

Doctors wondered if they could save his life. She didn't see him until he came out of surgery the next morning. As a nurse at Southern Maine Medical Center in Biddeford, she knew enough to be frightened.

He could not feel his legs. He asked if he was paralyzed and when he learned that he was, insisted he would walk again.

"Sitting at his bedside at Maine Medical Center for 24 hours a day was hard because a mother is supposed to fix everything, supposed to kiss the boo-boos and make them go away," she said.

In the several weeks following the accident, Anderson faced a series of complications - pneumonia, fevers, a collapsed lung. Eventually he was flown to the Shepherd Center, an Atlanta rehabilitation hospital for people with spinal cord injuries.

With his son facing months of rehabilitation and the need for round-the-clock care after that, Kenneth Anderson quit his job as an emergency medical technician to become his son's caregiver.

A jovial, boisterous man, Kenneth Anderson displays the same upbeat outlook as his son. When his son declared he was returning to Bryant College in Smithfield, R.I., to finish his degree despite doctors' doubts, his father agreed to provide the 24-hour care he needed.

"We do what we need to do and that's what we've done from the date of his accident and that's what we continue to do right today," Kenneth Anderson said. "It's been a horrific situation, but as a family we have just been drawn closer together."

Keith Anderson moved into a campus townhouse with a group of friends and the college gave his father a dorm room nearby.

Keith Anderson is paralyzed from the chest down, can move his arms but cannot use his hands. He took his exams orally or by typing with the pinkie knuckle of his left hand.

He refused a fully motorized wheelchair, choosing instead to have one with battery-assisted wheels that augment the gentle pushes he is able to muster.

"Those bigger ones, you actually feel like you're paralyzed, like there's something wrong with you," he said.

Returning to college was awkward for him and for his friends, but after several weeks they adjusted.

"I make it easy for them, I crack jokes at myself and I didn't just sit at home and drown myself in sorrow," he said.

His family bought a handicapped-accessible van, which meant his friends could take him out, whether to bars or to the driving range where he would watch them hit golf balls.

Anderson's positive attitude is not as uncommon as it might seem, said Dennis Fitzgibbons, director of operations for Alpha One, an advocacy organization for people with disabilities.

"I think what most people have seen for a long, long time is that personality and outlook on life doesn't really change dramatically, if at all, due to traumatic injury of this sort," Fitzgibbons said. "He was probably a positive, upbeat guy before and he's going to continue to be a positive, upbeat guy."

Anderson and his father had to adjust to being with each other constantly and Kenneth Anderson had to deal with being away from his wife and his daughter, Christine, for 20 months.

"The man left everything - his job, daughter, wife, friends," said Keith Anderson. "Without someone to take care of me I would never have gone to school. There's no way to say thank you for something like that."

"The guy's there when I wake up, when I go to bed, when I eat. He's there continually," Keith Anderson says with light-hearted exasperation. "The lack of independence just kind of sucks, but I could not have done anything without him."

In time, his college roommates took over much of his care at school, including turning him in his bed every three hours at night. His father reciprocated by doing the cooking and cleaning for the group of young men.

Anderson finished school in December. That same month, Bishop pleaded guilty to charges of aggravated assault and operating under the influence, with a minimum mandatory sentence of six months. Prosecutors say the 18 months she got was more than some manslaughter convictions.

Now Bishop uses dabs of jail toothpaste to stick pictures of her husband and her three young sons on the walls of her cell. She is pregnant with their fourth child, who will be born while she is in jail.

Her husband works in commercial real estate and must play the role of single father. Their 2-year-old is in day care, his brothers are in the first and fourth grades.

As difficult as it is to be locked away from her family, Bishop's guilt is far worse, said her husband.

"The worst part of the last two years is watching my wife try to cope with this reality. Kate's punishment of herself was something I had to watch happen," Greg Bishop said. "I watched this outgoing, dynamic individual start to destroy herself from the inside out. You could see her aging with the weight of this on her shoulders."

Sometimes a television commercial would trigger tearful sobs.

Bishop says his family's suffering does not compare to the Andersons', a point he makes often and emphatically. It is because the impact on that family is so great, he says, that the guilt is so strong.

"There isn't a cure for this one either. She cannot escape it," he said. "The worst sentence you could give her is, 'You have to live with this for the rest of your life.' "

Greg Bishop said he had agreed to stay home with their three children that evening so that his wife could have a night out, joining his sister and one of her friends who was visiting Maine.

"I can count on one hand the number of times she's been out in five years," he said of his wife. Gorham police called just past 11 p.m. to tell him she had been in accident and was being taken to Maine Medical Center.

Greg Bishop said his wife was adjusting something on her minivan's console as she slowed approaching the stop sign. When she looked up, she was headed into the lights of the pickup.

Bishop was wearing her seat belt, and for that her her husband is grateful.

"I know firsthand that instead of attending a sentencing I could have attended a funeral," he said.

Kate Bishop was indicted nine months after the accident and pleaded guilty in December. As the sentencing approached, the Bishops had to explain to their sons - 9, 7 and 2 - that their mother was going away.

"We told them that mom had made a terrible mistake, that a man had been injured," Bishop said, his voice catching in his throat. "It's important to us that the lessons of this affect as many people as possible. We're going to start in our house. . . . We want them to remember this time, when mommy made a terrible mistake."

He says his wife accepts responsibility for what she did, but he feels there are others who could have intervened before she got behind the wheel. When somebody says they are fine to drive after they have been drinking, the people around them should not accept it and should find them an alternative to driving, he said.

"It can happen to anybody. The alcohol doesn't care," he said. "Kate has the biggest heart I know of and the last time I saw her was in an orange jumpsuit across a partition. . . . There's no winners in this situation. There's just tragedy scattered in every direction."

As part of Kate Bishop's sentence, she is required to perform 500 hours of community service, either volunteering in a facility for people with spinal injuries or teaching others about the consequences of drunken driving.

Bishop said he and his wife won't stop when the requirement is fulfilled.

That need for atonement can be crucial for a person who has responsibility for a trauma, said Robert Fowler, director of outpatient counseling for Community Counseling Center in Portland. That need is even greater, he said, if the person's actions were inconsistent with their values.

"This person's act put a lot of weight on the negative side of their moral scale, and the only way to rebalance that is doing some kind of atonement, adding weight on the positive side," he said.

The Andersons say it is unfortunate that two families must suffer, that Bishop's children must be without their mother for so long. But at the same time, they say it is important to send a message to the world that drinking and driving can carry horrendous consequences.

"Rather than destroying one family, it's a destruction of two families. Nobody wants that but it needs to happen. The awareness has got to get out about the abuse of alcohol," Kenneth Anderson said. "I keep thinking there has to be some good that comes out of this horrible thing and maybe prevent this form happening to someone else."

Keith Anderson says he is not bitter toward Bishop, though he is angry that she never inquired about his well-being or apologized until earlier this month when she appeared before a judge for sentencing. Bishop wanted to, badly, said her husband, but was told not to by her lawyer. Later, the court forbade her to contact Anderson.

Anderson works out three or four times a week, special exercises to keep his body healthy, even those parts he cannot use. He works to keep his body strong and prays a cure is developed soon.

He admires the strides made by Christopher Reeve and Yarmouth native Travis Roy, who was paralyzed in a hockey accident in 1995. But he does not look to them for motivation.

"I inspire myself," he said. "I don't base my success on anyone else. I base my success on my own expectations. Anything I accomplish is good." Then he added, "It's never enough."

The cost of Anderson's care has been overwhelming. Much of the specialty equipment he needs is not covered by insurance, like his specialized wheelchair, which cost $11,500, and a pickup that cost $77,000 with the adaptations that will allow him to drive.

"We've completely exhausted our savings," Nancy Anderson said. "As of last week, we cashed in my husband's pension plan." The family plans to pursue legal claims in an effort to provide for Keith Anderson's future, but an assessment done of his long-term needs put the cost at $15 million over the course of his life.

In the meantime, the family set up the Keith Anderson Care and Treatment fund at Sanford Savings Bank in Buxton and they have received contributions from total strangers as well as donations of labor and materials to help make handicapped modifications to the house.

Anderson said he is adjusting to his new situation, but there are some things he hasn't been able to get over.

"The Red Sox need to build a new ballpark," he said. "The seats are nice but it's a bummer when somebody hits a ball or makes a good play. Everyone stands up and I can't see. Being able to stand up at Fenway and see where the ball goes is something people take for granted."

HOW TO HELP: To help offset medical bills and expensive equipment, the Anderson family has been accepting donations at the the Keith Anderson Care and Treatment fund at Sanford Institution for Savings, 247 Parker Farm Road, Buxton, Maine 04093.

Appeared in the Maine Sunday Telegram - February 15, 2004