Two years ago, Ricky was involved in a horrific accident in which he hung upside down in his smashed truck for 16 hours. When driving down Mt. Eden Road the night of Christmas Eve, he had missed a curve, bouncing off two trees, and the truck had landed on its cab in Calabazas Creek.

Unconscious, Ricky lay in the vehicle through the night and was found by friends late the next morning—Christmas Day. He was immediately flown to Stanford Hospital, where physicians found that he had hypothermia, a collapsed lung, kidney failure, a crushed right leg, and a serious brain injury called a diffused axonal injury. He fell into a weeklong coma.

"I wasn't entirely sure he was going to survive," says David Spain, professor of surgery and chief of trauma and surgical critical care at Stanford. Along with the affects of the severe crush injury, the neurological impacts of the accident were unknown. Several times, physicians thought they would have to amputate Ricky's right leg.

"Best case scenario, I thought he would survive with a poorly functioning leg," Spain says.

Dona Bunch, Ricky's mother, says even the therapy process last year provided the family with a poor outlook. "The physical therapist told us, 'This is as good as it gets. You're not going to be doing sports. You're not going to be running,' " she says. "He just gave us no hope."

But Ricky has proved the doctors wrong. Now 18 and a student at West Valley College, he has gone back to training in jujitsu, re-learned how to play the guitar, and recently started driving again. He can run in place, lift weights and ride an exercise bike. He's gone from 80 pounds—his weight during his four-month stay at Kaiser Permanente—to 170 pounds, slightly more than his pre-accident weight. He also managed to graduate on time from Saratoga in June of this year.

It wasn't easy, however; Ricky endured a dozen surgeries as well as months of grueling mental and physical rehabilitation to get to where he is now. And where he is now is still hopefully a far cry from where he will be in the future.

"Recovery I think is lifelong. I don't think I'll ever get to the way I was before," Ricky says. "But it's a process."

This process, as long and difficult as it may be, is just the latest in a series of miracles that Ricky and his family have experienced—although Ricky himself has trouble seeing those miracles.

"I wasn't there. I have no idea what happened. For all I know, I went to sleep one day and woke up a year later," he says. "You know the one big difference? They all lived it. I was asleep."

The accident and what followed after "is one of those things that make you rethink whatever spirituality you may or may not have," says Saratoga High School Assistant Principal Karen Hyde, who is close to the Bunches.

"An act of God" is what many have called the events that conspired to save Ricky's life that Christmas Day:

* Weather reports had indicated that it would rain that night. It didn't. If it had, Ricky would have drowned in the creek.

* Sheriff's deputies and others couldn't find Ricky, after frantically searching for hours and hours. But Ricky's friend Andrew Brady didn't want to give up, so he persuaded his father, Scott Brady, to keep on looking. Scott stopped his car at a particular spot on Mt. Eden Road, where he told his son to get out, and that's when Andrew saw the black Ford F150. Scott still can't say why he stopped where he did.

* If Ricky had been found a couple of hours later, he would have been dead. His hypothermia contributed to his survival, slowing down his vitals.

* And then there was the leg. Spain says Ricky's right thigh suffered from "compartment syndrome," where pressure and the cutting off of blood circulation caused the thigh muscle to swell. The connective tissue surrounding the muscle, however, did not expand; as a result, doctors had to slice open the layers of tissue to "let the muscle swell out."

Spain says he was most concerned not with the healing of the tissue or muscle, but with the nerves that had to be severed in the procedure. "If the nerve is still intact," he says, "the muscle will survive and do all right." Most of the nerves are still functioning, with a little bit of damage making Ricky unable to do the knee-jerk reflex.

But some of the muscles did die from those 16 hours in the truck, Ricky says, leading to the most recent surgery, in September 2003. "That's when they stuck a pump in and vacuumed bad stuff out and sewed it together," Dona says.

"His leg became what they call necrotic, where it looked like charcoal broiled hamburger," Hyde says. "A lot of us thought, 'This is not going to end well.' "

Today, Ricky's right leg is a network of scars that start at the top of his thigh and trickle down near his knee, with two scars on either side of his calf. Upon coming home in May 2003, he had to learn how to walk all over again, after spending six months on his back in a hospital bed.

"He would cry because he would get so frustrated," says his father, Rich Bunch. "He'd be trying to do something in jujitsu and then he would suddenly just fall." Rich also says Ricky would stumble for no apparent reason while walking.

But Dona says her son persisted, especially after getting the poor prognosis from the physical therapist. Ricky set up a gym in the backyard of the Saratoga home he shares with Dona, and started working out with friends.

"One night he came in and said, 'Look what I can do, Mom.' And he started running in place," she says.

Hyde remembers a recent visit that Ricky paid to her office at the high school. "All he did was squat to show me that he could do it," she says.

Ricky did so well physically, in fact, that he started taking driving lessons to re-earn his license, which he had first earned five days before the accident. He passed his test again in September. "It's felt totally normal to me, but everyone around me freaks out," he says.

Ricky also had to work on his vision. The neurological injury knocked his eyes out of alignment, and he had difficulty seeing and using proper depth perception in the beginning. For a time, he had to wear a patch over one eye or the other. He wore sunglasses to his graduation ceremony—not because it was a sunny day, but because he couldn't see all that well.

But the mental recovery was perhaps the most difficult part.

One of the therapists who visited the home regularly worked on memory recovery with Ricky. Ricky lost much of his short-term memory capabilities in the accident, and still doesn't remember the accident. But it is improving—after initially signing up for four courses at West Valley, he had to drop down to two, a workload that suits him better.

"He still forgets little things sometimes," his mother says. "But he always remembers them again."

Until just a few months ago, the "jiggling" in his brain made Ricky sick in the mornings. He would wake up, feeling nauseous, and vomit, sometimes several times. "He couldn't get out of the house," Dona says. "He had no energy."

Since he was a boy, playing guitar was one of the things that Ricky and his dad did together, and the blues is one of their passions (the others being martial arts and motorcycles). In fact, Rich says his son emerged from his coma to the sound of Stevie Ray Vaughan on the stereo. But he awoke not knowing how to play the guitar, and his father made teaching him a priority.

"By having him learn guitar again, it really enhanced his dexterity," Rich says. He adds that while Ricky can do complicated patterns on the instrument, he hasn't completely regained his sense of rhythm.

Ricky also had to work on his linguistic skills. He came home from the hospital with slurred speech, which has improved over time. "His speech is pretty good now. Except when he gets excited and talks really fast—then I can't understand him," Dona says.

"His slur, he's losing more and more every day," Rich says.

For Dona, the most startling thing has been the difference in personality and emotion in her son. The pre-accident Ricky had a quick temper and strong reactions. Dona says Spain told her that the brain injury would change Ricky's temperament—either make him flare up more easily or mellow him out. Ricky became the latter.

"He never complains," Dona says. "I've caught him sobbing but he never feels sorry for himself."

"I just really feel more grown up from all this. That's all I feel," Ricky says.

But the accident has also made Ricky think about his plans for the future. He says he's now interested in rescue work, and he's looking into EMT or rescue courses that he can handle physically and mentally. "I'd like to go down into creeks, cutting people out of trucks," he says.

Ricky has been inspired by the members of the Saratoga Fire Department, who extracted him from his truck by first attempting to use Jaws of Life and then using their hands to dig foam out of his driver's seat.

He also wants to get back onto a bike sometime soon, but his parents are cautious. "I haven't let him ride a motorcycle yet. I know he'd like to, but what kind of dad would I be?" Rich says.

Dona says there are definitely limitations to what her son can do. "He wanted to be a firefighter. But that's out now. And before the accident, Ricky was going to try out for the North American Olympic team [in judo]," she says.

Even in jujitsu, he can't do things the same way he did before. According to Rich, Ricky used to excel at throws, but he now concentrates on sweeps; instead of the kicks that he used to do, Ricky now must focus on different kicks.

"He's had to adapt. He's still going through a learning period of what he can do and can't do," Rich says.

Rich says his son has his good days and bad days. Some days, Ricky gets tired and isn't up doing anything active. Other days, it's almost impossible to spot any impacts from the accident.

And Ricky must be extremely careful in his physical pursuits. According to Dona, he has an atrophy in the brain that is stagnant at the moment, but regular tests monitor the progress of the atrophy.

Ricky can never go through another brain injury again—the impact would be disastrous.

Dona and Rich also say that they are forever changed by the experience. "It aged me. Arguably the toughest thing I've ever been through," Rich says. "At one point I thought I'd lost him."

"I'm not over it yet. I have nightmares," Dona says. "I guess the holiday is difficult for me. I have such horrible memories. And it's not easy. Ricky has hard times."

Despite the uncertainty that surrounds Ricky's future, those who know him and know about the accident are convinced of one thing: "It wasn't his time. I think God has a plan for him," Rich says.

"We look at other cases and we think, 'Why did we survive all this? Why us? Why not someone else?' " Dona says.

"He made it. We're grateful. He will be a great contributor to the world—he just doesn't know it yet," Hyde says. "This is good for Ricky in that he's exploring who he is to become."

Dona also says the accident brought the community together. Hyde and some of the family's friends visited the hospital at least every other day, often spending the night, she says. "The support of our relatives and friends, and prayers ... I've got to believe that that's what got Ricky through it."

"It's hard to overestimate the importance of family support," Spain says. She remembers seeing Ricky's parents and friends camped out at the ICU before Ricky was transferred to Kaiser.

Spain most recently saw Ricky in November 2003, at a reunion for survivors and medical personnel at Stanford's trauma unit, where Ricky was one of the most impressive cases. "Obviously, Ricky has exceeded our expectations," Spain says. "You never know what makes a patient go well or go poorly. Every now and then you're surprised." What will further surprise Spain when he sees Ricky at the next trauma reunion, in March?

Watching Ricky do the squats.