It was 8 p.m. on Thursday, April 28, when Alondra Romero got out of the rented car in which she was traveling to change seats, get behind the wheel and continue her journey from Cayey to Condado in San Juan. She had arrived on vacation in Puerto Rico just three days earlier, when a car on Highway 52 lost control and hit her.
Now Alondra, a 23-year-old resident of Los Angeles, CA is fighting for her life after the enormous number of injuries left by the accident. The doctors who treat her at the Medical Center do not yet have an accurate prognosis, but they already anticipate that she will have to learn to walk again.
Stephanie Romero, her older sister, arrived on the Island the day after the accident, from California, to accompany her.
“My sister is going to be 15 days in the hospital. They have her in the ICU. She broke her pelvis, her entire right foot is broken in several places, from her knee down it is also broken. Her left foot is getting infected by the wound that the accident left her. And they have her connected to a ventilator because her lungs were hit and she can’t breathe on her own. The car hit her from the waist down “
After stopping after the accident, the driver who hit the young woman was arrested but was later released since he was not intoxicated and at the moment it is believed that the crash was due to him losing control of the vehicle. However, Alondra’s family maintains that he was driving and distracted while looking at his cell phone.
“We have passed through there, there is no way for a car to lose control. The driver was distracted or something like that,” says the sister of the injured young woman who days before was walking happily around the Island posting photos on social media with a friend. .
“We need a lot of help because we are not from Puerto Rico. We are from California and we came here suddenly,” she explains in a pause between medical reports.
Every morning, Stephanie and her brother Daniel, who also traveled to Puerto Rico after the accident, go to the Medical Center looking for news about Alondra. They want to be as close as possible to her little sister.
This is the second case of a tourist in serious condition on the Island, after Beth Callahan, from Massachusetts, had a serious accident last February in Puerto Rico.
Over the weekend, the doctors were lowering Alondra’s sedatives and she has been waking up from the coma she was in. On Saturday she managed to open her eyes, giving her family all the hope that she will be able to recover from the critical state she is in, although she still cannot communicate because she is connected to the ventilator.
In addition, Alondra has a pelvic surgery ahead of her and another on her right foot. “She’s going to need a lot of physical therapy,” Stephanie says, anticipating, “I’m not leaving without my sister.”
