Second of three parts.

Four days after losing control of his bicycle and slamming - face-first - into an oncoming car, Matt Miller lay in the ICU at the University of Virginia Medical Center.

Nerves controlling the left side of his face didn't work, and he couldn't close his left eye.

His mouth zigzagged like a plunging stock-market table. Every one of his 32 teeth was lost, broken, or compromised.

His jaw was wired shut, and he couldn't talk.

"He looks like a person who's had a massive stroke," recalled Stephen Park, the surgeon who reconstructed Matt's face with titanium rods and screws. "You're drooling. You're not smiling. Any number of things make you look visibly deformed. It's a tough pill to swallow."

Matt still had no concept of any of this.

Nor would he remember what he typed on an "ICU talk device" that doctors gave him that day, Thursday, Nov. 6:

"Can I go to physics lab?"

Was Matt delirious or serious, or both?

That afternoon, his brother, Michael, heading back to Stanford Law School, told Matt, "I'll see you at Thanksgiving, no matter where you are."

Matt remembers thinking, "What are you talking about? Of course, I'll be home for Thanksgiving."

This was his first memory since the accident.

By Sunday, a week after he had crashed on an 85-mile triathlon training ride, Matt understood where he was, what had happened. He scribbled on a legal pad:

"I'm going home for Thanksgiving."

That would be in 18 days.

Not one doctor believed this possible.

The wiring in his brain had been twisted and torn - and the extent of the damage was still unknown.

The surgeons treating Matt assumed he would go from the hospital to a rehab facility to work on the memory and speech impairments, personality changes, and weakness that follow brain injury.

Yet on Tuesday, at Matt's insistence, his girlfriend since senior year at Radnor High School, Emily Privette, brought a laptop so he could register for spring classes. Matt was in his third year at the University of Virginia.