• Wounded by alcohol
• Anatomy of a disease
• Fetuses especially vulnerable to harm from alcohol
• Alcohol's heavy toll on the brain
• Alcohol-related deaths in 1992

A surgeon operates on Andrew Pipes, who suffered eye damage when he was seriously injured in a car accident caused by a drunken driver on Dec. 27, 1995. It was the fourth eye operation for Pipes in the painful aftermath of the crash. Staff photo by David A. Rodgers

Lee Jones could see the life slipping from the man before him.

The man lay on the backboard, unconscious. His head was swollen and bloody from the crash, his breathing shallow and slowing, his face turning blue.

Jones, a paramedic, lifted the man he would later learn was Andrew Pipes into the ambulance. Pipes, 45, was an insurance adjuster. Moments earlier, he had finished his morning coffee, kissed his wife goodbye and was driving along Route 202 in Winthrop when a pickup truck crossed the center lane and careened into him.

The pickup driver, Michael Carney, had been doing what he'd done for the past 15 years: driving drunk, without a license.

Carney, 32, had been drinking all night and was cruising around with an open beer when he hit Pipes. It was his third OUI that month and his seventh since he began driving as a teen-ager.

While Carney sat in a police cruiser with a cut lip and stinking of beer, the ambulance carrying Pipes sped toward the Kennebec Valley Medical Center in Augusta. Jones pumped blood into Pipes' arms and rigged a portable breathing ventilator over his mouth.

''I don't think this one is going to make it,'' Jones thought.

Pipes' car bears the damage caused when a pickup driven by a drunken man slammed into it after crossing the center lane on Route 202 in Winthrop. Photo courtesy Pipes family

Pipes astonished Jones and the doctors who rushed him into the emergency room the morning of Dec. 27, 1995. Despite suffering a concussion, eye damage, internal bleeding, multiple broken bones and a coma that lingered for nine days, Pipes did survive.

Rescue workers consider Pipes' recovery a miracle. But it has come at a devastating cost. The accident has forever diminished Andrew Pipes' life.

Since the December morning when Carney nearly killed him, Pipes has spent two months in the hospital and six months in a wheelchair. He has taken countless medications, and endured more than a year in pain.

It has taken 11 doctors and as many operations to repair his maimed body.

He has undergone four operations to patch together his broken bones. He's needed skin grafts and bone grafts to mend his right shin after it snapped and ripped a fist-sized hole in his leg.

His abdomen and bladder had to be cut open to remove an egg-sized stone, a complication that arose after having a catheter tube in his urinary tract for six weeks.

''Before the accident, he was disgustingly healthy,'' his wife, Claudia, says. ''He could move refrigerators, furniture. He was a bull of a man. He never got sick.''

Pipes talks with his wife, Claudia, before surgery to try to correct his double vision. Though his sight has improved, Pipes still sees two of everything whenever he looks to the left or tips his head slightly upward. Staff photo by David A. Rodgers

Now Pipes' body is a quilted mass of scars and nerve damage.

His left foot remains numb from nerve damage, leaving Pipes to walk in a careful, stilted gait, dragging a foot he cannot feel.

And his eyesight will never be normal. The impact of slamming his face into the windshield damaged Pipes' inner-eye muscles, leaving his pupils to droop toward his nose. Pipes was left cross-eyed, with double vision.

Doctors have operated four times on his eyes, trying to re-center his pupils. Each time, they've injected needles into his face to numb his eyes and to induce temporary amnesia, helping Pipes to forget the agonizing and uncomfortable procedure.

Though his sight has improved, Pipes still sees two of everything whenever he looks to the left or tips his head slightly upward.

The operations and countless trips to the doctors have worn him down but Pipes is determined to regain remnants of his old life. He yearns to shed the overwhelming sense of helplessness that has consumed him since the accident. His double vision has prevented him from working, driving a car or doing simple chores like mowing the lawn.

He longs to put in a day's work, drive himself to the store or enjoy small pleasures like hitting a golf ball at the driving range.

''I want,'' Pipes says, ''to be a productive person again.''

Pipes considers himself blessed not to be one of the 53 people who died in drunken-driving accidents in Maine in 1995. Often it's those cases that grab headlines and public concern. But little attention is paid to the more than 1,000 people, like Pipes, who are injured each year in crashes involving alcohol.

Pipes and his wife, Claudia have grown accustomed to waiting in hospitals during his long recovery from the accident that forever altered his life. "The thought of him having to go through this four times makes me cry," says Claudia. Staff photo by David A. Rodgers

''I see a victim of a drunken-driving crash come into the emergency room once a week,'' said Dr. Marcia O'Rourke, the general surgeon at Kennebec Valley Medical Center who worked to save Pipes' life. ''Unfortunately, these crashes are very, very common.''

And, like Pipes, the survivors of drunken-driving crashes tend to suffer severe and multiple injuries.

Nationally, 1,058,990 were injured in alcohol-related crashes in 1995 - an average of one person every 30 seconds for an entire year. The annual cost of those crashes, according to Mothers Against Drunk Driving, is estimated to be upwards of $64 billion, and close to $200 million in Maine.

For severely injured crash victims like Pipes, medical, legal, rehabilitation, insurance and lost productivity costs can top $700,000.

After 20 months, Pipes' medical bills and disability pay alone are more than $233,000 and climbing. Because he was on the job at the time of the accident, most of Pipes' medical costs and wages have been covered by workers' compensation.

And with continuing eye problems and infections, Pipes knows that his medical bills won't be ending any time soon.

''The injuries Andrew Pipes suffered are typical,'' said Waterville Dr. Steven Bonowitz, the plastic surgeon who patched the hole in Pipes' right ankle. ''It's a long, hard road back for a lot of these people. And many will never be 100 percent again.''

It has become painfully clear to Andrew Pipes that he will never be the healthy man he was before he got in his car that December morning.

For the most part, Pipes is an even-tempered, gentle, religious man. He is like a comfortable uncle, with a ready smile and a kind word. He speaks slowly in a low, even voice. Before the accident, it took a lot to unnerve him.

But lately, he's found himself punching walls out of frustration over the seemingly never-ending progression of operations and illnesses that prey on his weakened body.

''A lot of people come out of these accidents with their brains like mush,'' Pipes says. ''The Lord blessed me that I'm still able to reason and think. But nothing is the same. I'll never be the same.''

The driver who hit Pipes' car that morning, Michael Carney, is serving a 15-year sentence at the Maine State Prison.

''After nearly killing someone, I definitely need to be in here,'' Carney says of his life in prison. ''I dug a pretty big hole for myself.''

Dr. William Lavin, assisted by registered nurse Kelly Paquette, operates on Pipes at Maine Medical Center. Besides the discomfort of the surgical procedure, Pipes was warned that each of the eye operations he has undergone had the potential to leave him blind.Staff photo by David A. Rodgers

Pipes has no memory of the accident that nearly killed him. When he woke from his nine-day coma, he found his wrists restrained. There was a tube in his arm to feed him, wires in his chest to help him breathe. His legs were in traction. His left arm was in a cast.

And there was something wrong with his vision. He saw two of everything.

He spent two months in the hospital while doctors began piecing his broken bones together.

Bits of metal were placed in his left arm to fuse his broken wrist bone.

Six rods were drilled into his busted right shinbone to hold it together.

Doctors removed bone fragments from Pipes' pelvis to strengthen his weakened shinbone.

When his shin didn't heal properly, doctors had to break it and set it again.

As the bone began to mend, a plastic surgeon began patching the fist-sized hole where the shin tore through Pipes' ankle.

Doctors removed healthy tissue from Pipes' right calf to replace the destroyed muscle over his shin. Then they took a flap of skin from his thigh and stitched it over the gaping ankle wound.

Nearly eight weeks after the crash, Pipes was released to go home. He arrived at his red-shingled house in a wheelchair. He wore a patch over one eye to eliminate his double vision.

Nurses and therapists visited him for five months. They showed him exercises to strengthen his legs. They taught him how to walk with his left foot rendered numb due to nerve damage.

While his broken ribs, hip, left arm and legs healed, he was virtually helpless. His wife bathed and clothed him. She helped him go to the bathroom to relieve himself.

As the winter waned, Pipes lay immobilized on the couch, watching his wife haul wood inside or shovel snow from the drive and walkway.

''You get to the point you feel so helpless that you don't feel like much of a man anymore,'' Pipes says.

The operations on his eyes began in December 1996, a year after the crash.

To correct the double vision, doctors needed to pull Pipes' pupils back to the center. Only one eye could be operated on at a time. During each surgery, doctors injected a needle to numb his upper cheek and eye.

Besides the discomfort, Pipes was warned that each of the four surgeries could blind him. The risk concerned him, but he didn't like the alternative of seeing double for the rest of his life. Pipes and his wife, Claudia, prayed that the surgery would be successful.

Dr. William Lavin bandages Pipes' eye after the operation. After each of his four surgeries, Pipes' vision has gradually improved.Staff photo by David A. Rodgers

''The thought of him having to go through this four times makes me cry,'' says Claudia.

Slowly, after each of the four eye operations, Pipes' vision has gradually improved.

''I can read now and work on my computer,'' he says proudly.

In between his eye surgeries, Pipes had his gallbladder removed. Pipes believes the surgery was a byproduct of the constant stress brought on by the crash.

''December was not a good month,'' he says.

At home with his wife on a summer afternoon, Pipes sits on a chair in the living room. He talks calmly and with resignation about his ordeal.

''The toughest thing is that I've lost a year and half of my life,'' he says. ''All that time is gone and I'll never get it back.''

Dressed in shorts on this humid day, his scars, normally hidden beneath trousers, are visible.

Six red circles dot his right leg, marking where rods were drilled inside his shinbone to hold it together. His ankle, where the bone ripped through, remains disfigured, indented as if an animal took a jagged baseball-sized bite from his leg.

He pulls his red shorts up to reveal another scar on his thigh, where skin was removed to cover the hole in his ankle.

''I wouldn't win any bathing-suit contests,'' Pipes jokes.

The scars on his body don't bother him as much as the boredom and frustration that plagues his days. His vision still prevents him from most tasks.

''I tried mowing the lawn the other day but I kept cutting over the same piece of grass,'' Pipes says.

Following surgery, Pipes is assistend from the operating table and onto a gurney by Kevin McMurrow. After 20 months, Pipes' medical bills and disability pay have totaled more than $233,000.Staff photo by David A. Rodgers

And every time he rides in the car with his wife, he sees four lanes instead of two, reminding him it may be months before his eyesight improves enough so it's safe for him to drive.

He talks wistfully about the possibility of returning to work before the two-year anniversary of the accident - Dec. 27, 1997.

''I really would like to be able to drive myself around and put in a day's work,'' he said. ''I'd like to feel like a productive person again. Do something worthwhile.''

Pausing a moment to look at his wife, he adds: ''But I know there are no guarantees. I try to take one day at a time. And I try not to think too much about the future.''