January 29, 2010 -- The call woke Flo Larson at 1a.m. It was the sheriff's office on the phone.

"We need you to identify your daughter's car," they said.

Her daughter's car? But her daughter hadn't even been out on the road.

They had talked on the phone at around 11 that night. Her daughter, Fran, was safely home from a night out with some high school friends.

She had just graduated from Ole Miss, where she had been on the homecoming court. She was starting a new job.

"Everything was perfect," said Larson. "She was going to have a great life."

Then the call at 1 a.m.

It turns out that after she hung up on the 11 p.m. call, Fran decided to pop over to her mother's house to get her dog.

"She started down the road and she flipped her car," said Larson. "I asked if she was dead."

The ambulance took Fran, unconscious, to the local hospital. The doctors quickly realized they were overmatched.

"They told me she had to go to The Med," said Flo. "I asked, 'Can't they keep her here?' I didn't even know where The Med was."

" " "

If you were going to pick the two words most likely to chase off local newspaper readers, "The Med" might be those two.

The Med is in trouble? Yeah, well. What else is new? The Med is in trouble and the schools want more money and wake me up when this is over, OK?

Besides, The Med is for gunshot victims, isn't it? I watch the local news.

"We hear that all the time," said Gene Holcomb, chairman of The Med. "All we do is take care of people with gunshot wounds and knife wounds, people who should be taking care of themselves. Nothing could be further from the truth. The truth is that 75 percent of the people who are treated in our trauma unit do not have gunshot wounds. They're people like you and I who fall off a ladder putting up Christmas decorations, or who were in a car wreck."

Holcomb is calm and understated when he says all this. Larson is less so.

She happens to be from Clarksdale, Miss., where she helped start Mississippi's Friends of The Med.

"The Med is the place for people who have nowhere else to go," she said. "And I don't mean for financial reasons. I mean for medical reasons. And if the stupidity of this whole area allows the doors to close on that trauma center ... "

Larson stops. Then she starts in on her story. Maybe then people will understand.

"My daughter had no pulse," she said. "Three times, they told me she wasn't going to live.

"She had a lacerated liver, a collapsed lung, a crushed left arm, a broken femur and a brain stem contusion, which is the worst kind of head injury."

Two teams of surgeons went to work to save Fran. A chaplain stayed with Larson the entire time.

This happened 11 years ago, by the way. Larson still can't get through the story without misting up in gratitude.

"When I think about what that hospital did for us," she said, "my daughter was in a coma for more than three months. On the Glasgow coma scale (which ranges from a low of 1 to a high of 15), she was a 4 when she went in. Afterward, I asked a doctor what happens to patients who are a 4. I was told, 'They die.'"

Fran didn't die. She still has her share of troubles -- she's hard to understand on the phone, for example -- but she's living that great life, after all. She married her high school sweetheart. One of the doctors who attended to Fran the night she first arrived at The Med walked Larson down the aisle.

"It's a straight-out-of-the-Bible miracle," said Larson, "but God's vehicle was The Med."

So, yes, it's completely understandable if you don't make it through another front-page story on the crisis facing The Med. It's completely understandable if your eyes glaze over at the very thought.

But don't pretend this is about someone else. Unless you know you'll never be in a car wreck, never suffer from severe burns, never fall off a ladder, or have a high-risk pregnancy, or have children who drive cars.

"If you've got a child or a grandchild, you've got a dog in this fight," said Larson. "It only affects you if you breathe."