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After 20 years, victim of drunken driver talks again

Sarah Scantlin, who was injured when she was 18, now can do more than blink to communicate.

HUTCHINSON, Kan. - For 20 years, Sarah Scantlin has been mostly oblivious to the world around her - the victim of a drunken driver who struck her down as she walked to her car. Today, after a remarkable recovery, she can talk again.

Scantlin's father knows she will never fully recover, but her newfound ability to speak and her returning memories have given him his daughter back. For years, she could only blink - one for "no," two for "yes" - to respond to questions that no one knew for sure she understood.

"I am astonished how primal communication is. It is a key element of humanity," Jim Scantlin said, blinking back tears.

Sarah Scantlin was an 18-year-old college freshman on Sept. 22, 1984, when she was hit by a drunken driver as she walked to her car after celebrating with friends at a teen club. That week, she had been hired at a clothing store and won a spot on the drill team at Hutchinson Community College.

Scantlin still suffers constantly from the accident. She habitually crosses her arms across her chest, her fists clenched under her chin. Her legs constantly spasm and thrash. Her right foot is so twisted it is almost reversed. Her neck muscles are so constricted she cannot swallow to eat.

A week ago, her parents got a call from Jennifer Trammell, a licensed nurse at the Golden Plains Health Care Center. She asked Betsy Scantlin if she was sitting down, told her someone wanted to talk to her and switched to phone to speaker mode:

"Hi, Mom."

"Sarah, is that you?" her mother asked.

"Yes," came the throaty reply.

"How are you doing?"

"Fine."

"Do you need anything?" her mother asked her later.

"More makeup."

"Did she just say more makeup?" the mother asked the nurse.

Scantlin started talking in mid January but asked staff members not to tell her parents until Valentine's Day, Trammell said. But last week she could not wait any longer to talk to them.

The breakthrough came when the nursing home's activity director, Pat Rincon, was working with Scantlin and other patients, trying to get them to speak.

Rincon had just gotten another resident to reply "Okay," when she heard Sarah behind her repeat the words: "Okay. Okay."

Scantlin's doctor, Bradley Scheel, said physicians are not sure why she began talking but believe critical pathways in the brain may have regenerated.

"It is extremely unusual to see something like this happen," Scheel said.

Family members say her understanding of the outside world comes mostly from news and soap operas that played in her room. On Saturday, her brother asked whether she knew what a CD was. Sarah said she did, and she knew it had music on it.

But when he asked her how old she was, Sarah guessed she was 22. When her brother gently told her she was 38 years old now, she just stared silently back at him.

[Last modified February 13, 2005, 01:09:06]