Athens — Every few months, Georgia women's basketball coach Andy Landers receives an e-mail from Beverly Wright.

Wright, a nurse for Northeast Alabama Regional Medical Center, doesn't keep up with all of her former patients. That would be impossible.

But in three hours, she built a lifelong friendship with Andy and his son, Drew, when Drew was brought into her emergency room in June 2007.

"The kids you don't forget," Wright said.

Drew and two of his best friends, David Firth and Ja'Rius Ross, were riding home from a basketball camp with North Oconee High School assistant coach Timothy "Shawn" Smith when a tractor-trailer crossed over a median on I-20 near Oxford, Ala., and collided head-on with their Honda Accord.

Smith was killed. Drew, who was asleep in the front with the passenger seat reclined, suffered a severe brain injury and bruised lungs. When he reached the hospital he was having seizures. Wright didn't think he would make it.

Now, a year later, she has pictures on her bulletin board at work of she and Drew from her visit to Athens for the Auburn-Georgia football game last year. Drew is fine, no longer on seizure medication — a miracle, Wright says — and is about to start his freshman year of college at Ole Miss.

"So many times you just hear the bad things," she said.

Andy Landers was watering plants in his yard when his wife rounded the corner with the news. They jumped in their car and sped toward Alabama.

"As a parent, you're thinking, 'OK, a wreck. A fatality. A tractor-trailer truck. A Honda Accord. Are we cut up? Are we mangled?' " Landers said.

They made it just in time to see Drew getting strapped to a gurney to be airlifted to Grady Memorial Hospital. They jumped back in their car, but felt some comfort after seeing their son alive.

Drew spent a week in the hospital, mostly sedated. He received hundreds of visitors. When Drew regained consciousness, his parents started asking him questions.

"Do you know where you're at? Do you know what happened? You've been in an accident," Landers recalls and stops, his eyes reddening as he fights back tears.

They just received gibberish responses. The last thing Drew remembers before the accident is listening to music and falling asleep. The first thing he remembers after the accident is walking out of the hospital with his father to go home.

"[Wright] actually called me at Grady a couple of days after we were there to see how he was doing," Andy said. "Really, she called to see if he made it. I got into, 'He's doing well,' and she just [went], 'Whew.' She sighed."

Drew has never seen photos of the car. He and his two friends talked about the accident a lot, but never discussed anything specific. Firth was the only one who saw the crash coming. He pulled the pillow he was holding over his face and ducked.

"He didn't tell me anything about it. I didn't want to hear anything about it," Drew said. "He saw it all. He got the roughest deal out of all of us."

When he returned home, Drew was allowed outside only for doctor checkups. He did exercises to work on his balance and experienced some short-term memory loss. Drew said he still randomly forgets things, but it's not as bad as it once was.

Luckily, Drew and his friends got to experience their senior year of high school. His best memory is his first winning basketball season.

"Nobody had faith in us at all. And then we started selling out the games. That was a lot of fun," he said. "Golf was a lot of fun. Dances were a lot of fun. And then just getting out of high school was definitely solid. That was amazing."

He wanted to go to a big university but preferred to leave the state, so he chose to become a Rebel and attended summer classes.

He's going through Brett Favre-like withdrawals now that his sport-playing days are over, so he lives vicariously through video games. He likes to compete as Georgia on NCAA Football 09 with his roommate. The Bulldogs are ranked just as high on the game as they are in real life.

"We were playing that a lot just so we could talk trash to the Ole Miss people," he said.

When Drew returns to school Aug. 25, he will drive past the scene of the accident. He said he doesn't notice it. Still, Wright's most recent e-mail reveals how quickly it could have all gone the other way.

On July 25, 2008, she wrote to Andy Landers, "How is everyone?? Especially my Drew? ... I had a really bad young man for a patient last week, the same injuries as Drew, they were also from Georgia. ... sadly this young man died en route to Grady. Since that night last week I have had you all on my mind and so thankful for our good story!"