Kathy Hurd and Kathi Sturgeon were Bodacious Babes – members of a women's cycling group – riding in El Dorado Hills in 2008, when a drunk 19-year-old driver ran them down at 10 a.m.

Sturgeon suffered severe brain damage. Hurd's back was broken. The driver, Brandi Thomas, went to jail for a year.

Sturgeon and Hurd are back together – off the road.

They're pioneering a program that is new to the Sacramento area and, research evidence shows, can help prevent teen driver crashes.

PARTY – for Prevent Alcohol and Risk-Related Trauma in Youth – was created in Canada and is used in only three or four places in the United States.

Hurd and Sturgeon were at Folsom Mercy Hospital Friday, working with 65 sophomores from Vista del Lago High School.

Sturgeon was there to show what it's like to suffer brain trauma.

She had the students cover their hands with felt mitts – to blunt the use of fingers – and then try to button up shirts.

"How'd you do that?" cheerleader Alex McAlister asked a friend who mastered the task. "That was harder than it looks."

That's one of PARTY's points: Rehab is hard.

Sturgeon relearned dressing, walking, eating. Learning to trace the whole alphabet again took her two weeks.

At one point she remembers asking how long she'd be in rehab.

"She told me for the rest of my life," Sturgeon recalls.

"That's her," gasped student Nicole Werra to a friend, pointing at an enlarged photo of Sturgeon in the hospital, with her head bandaged.

The bandage is labeled, "No Bone."

"They removed part of my skull," Sturgeon told the group.

Sturgeon's tale is painful, and it's moving to think of how she and Hurd urged a judge not to sentence Thomas to prison.

But that's not what hits the students hardest.

They participate in a reconstruction of the aftermath of an auto accident, complete with a crushed car.

A lecture by emergency room Dr. David Smith is even more eye-opening.

Perhaps "eye-closing" would be more appropriate.

"Oh! Do not look," said Ian Berkalacich, as Smith showed graphic photos and video clips of the gruesome aftermath of real auto accidents.

His friend, Katie Reinard, hid her eyes on his shoulder.

"You can tell them about this in the class until you're blue in the face," said Kay McAleer, the students' health teacher, who arranged the half-day field trip.

"You have to hit them right between the eyes," she said.

The PARTY program works, in part, because it hits teens between the eyes in a hospital setting, with real accident survivors, medical, fire and police personnel.

And slides like Smith's that make the classic "Red Asphalt" films seem timid.

"That was so tame compared to this," said student Lainy Sessa.

Research in Canada, where the program has existed for 25 years, compared like groups of teens – some who had been in the program, some who had not.

"It did show a decrease in driving offenses and collisions in the students who attend the program," said Joanne Banfield, manager of trauma injury prevention at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, Canada's leading trauma center and the place PARTY started.

Though PARTY combines aspects of noted drug or driver programs like DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) or Every 15 Minutes, the nonprofit program's proponents say its hospital setting makes it unusual.

Students in PARTY programs are exposed to intensive care unit and emergency room tools and procedures.

Hurd also believes it works by targeting kids before they get their licenses, before they acquire bad habits, like not wearing seat belts or texting while driving.

Whatever makes it work, Hurd is committed to finding funding – as much as $5,000 per program – to bring it to more schools in Placer and El Dorado counties.

"I wanted to help out after the accident," she said. "It feels like the perfect place to be helping. I feel like we were saved that day for that reason."

KCRA: Cyclists hit by drunken driver forgive her

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