(CNN) — Soon after Paul Coskie’s bicycle collided with a car, it became clear to his mother that her son would be sick for a very long time, and indeed he was. The 13-year-old boy went into a coma for a month and spent six months total in the hospital.
What his mother didn’t know at the time was that Paul’s collision would eventually claim another victim — one who was nowhere near the accident scene.
After taking care of her son for a year, Dixie Fremont-Smith Coskie started to lose her balance, stumbling at times when she walked. Then she became so weak she couldn’t get out of bed.
“I had tingling down my arm and terrible pain in my neck,” remembers Coskie, 50, who lives in Upton, Massachusetts. “I thought I had Lou Gehrig’s disease, but was so frightened I couldn’t even tell my husband.”
