''Kyle O'Brian'' is a 17-year-old high school senior, Tae Kwan Do instructor, a kid getting ready for his admissions interview for Ohio State University. He goes to a party with a lifelong friend, but the evening ends with Kyle in the emergency room, battered and with a broken back. He is never the same again, physically, mentally or emotionally.

This fictional tale is told in "Accidental Impact: What Happens When the Victim Survives" by author Brian Hershey, 30, a Steubenville native, who broke his back in an automobile accident resulting from a friend driving drunk in 2002. At the time, Hershey was a senior just a few weeks away from finishing his fifth year at Ohio State University.

"All of what Kyle experiences in the hospital is 95 percent true," said Hershey, the son of attorney Adrian V. "Ed" Hershey and Sue Hershey, president of the Jefferson County Chamber of Commerce. Hershey was nearly 23 when the accident occurred.

He lives in Cincinnati with his wife, Angela, and earned his master's degree in education from OSU. But his is not a tale without painful detours from the usual track of life.

Kyle's tale details Hershey's own long and painful hospital recovery from having metal rods inserted in his back, along with fusing of lumbar disks in his spine, learning to walk and do routine tasks again, as well as a lingering mental deficit involving the short-term memory's ability to retain lessons that took months to overcome.

Hershey, who teaches middle school classes in Cincinnati, said he chose to make Kyle - his fictional character going through his personal experiences - a high school student because that would appeal to a wider range of readers.

"Not everyone has a college experience," he said. "But just about everyone has a high school experience."

The first printing of "Accidental Impact" was completed in August. The book includes suggested questions for young people to discuss, which Hershey said he hopes will make the book useful as a classroom tool, though he notes ethically he won't use it in his own classes.

He intends the book as a cautionary tale of the dangers of drunken driving, but more importantly as a way to get young people to focus on the impact a bad decision made in a split second can have on another person's life.

"That's why I wrote from the first person in the victim's point of view," he said. "We get told all the time about losing our driver's license or destroying our car, but what does drunken driving cause the victim? Instead of looking back with remorse from the driver's point of view, this is a point of view from the injured, and most of the time we don't have these stories to tell."

Kyle has to struggle to get through his last few months of high school and to pass a couple of tests to graduate. For Hershey, it was a question of passing classes to allow him to graduate from Ohio State.

While Kyle's mental recovery occurs within months, his creator's recovery took about 18 months.

Hershey's brain experienced swelling that took a long time to go away. As a result, when he tried to focus for long periods on studying, the result was headaches and an inability to retain what he had just read or studied.

"I had these horrible headaches. It was like a vice was being squeezed in a halo around my head," he said. "Fortunately, there wasn't permanent damage, but I had to learn how to learn again."

Kyle doesn't remember much about the accident. There are some mental images and a story from his friend who was driving that doesn't seem to fit much of the available evidence or the police reports. Hershey said that's pretty much true in his case.

"I remember getting into the passenger seat of the car and closing my eyes and waking up inside an MRI tube, in a world of pain," he said.

It was 14 months of physical rehabilitation and two years off from school to get his full mental acumen back while working in a book store. There were three major surgeries as well as the realization that his pace was going to be a little slower physically than it was before the wreck.

Hershey's book grinds through the pains of a slow recovery, including for Kyle amid all the heavy pain and the discomfort of life. There was a catheter for the first week after the wreck. He broke a toe just by taking his first step. And he had to re-learn simple tasks like handling a pot of water in the kitchen because his back hurt too much to lift the pot.

"Scaring kids is effective, but they need to see what happens, what others go through to get back to 'normal,'" he said.

Kyle is emotionally impacted when his friend who was driving in the accident assumes Kyle is OK a few weeks later simply because he's out of the hospital and walking around. Hershey said he was far from normal when he first came home from the hospital, facing pain, living with limited ability to move and the lingering effects of the deep concussion and whiplash from the wreck. He is still finding lingering effects from the injuries, including abdominal scarring that has started causing him pain.

"It changed everything," he said.

Hershey is making himself available to provide motivational talks to young people, an effort he anticipates will pick up in the spring around graduation and prom party time.

"Accidental Impact," printed by AuthorHouse, is available on Amazon.com or from Barnes and Noble or the AuthorHouse Web site.