Doctors removed two pounds of sand - enough to completely fill two coffee mugs - from Jeff Irene's body.

Three times, they almost lost him. Blood leaked from a massive chest wound that exposed his heart and lungs. His pelvis was broken; his insides filled with debris from the road.

It's a miracle he survived long enough to make it inside the Wyoming Medical Center emergency room.

About 2 a.m. on Dec. 30, 2007, a Chevrolet Tahoe struck him in the parking lot of a Casper bar. The sport utility vehicle dragged him for more than a mile through the cold city streets. Police would later follow a trail of blood from the Sandbar Lounge to a home on Oak Street.

Somehow, doctors managed to save his life. They filled him with 27 pints of blood - more than three gallons - and used a muscle cut from his back to plug the hole in his abdomen.

But that alone wouldn't be enough to save him.

***

You can forgive Jeff Irene if he walks a little gingerly these days.

The walker and the cane are gone, as are the tubes and machines that kept him alive. But the pain is constant, although it's manageable with pills and patches.

The 40-year-old father of two looks thin, but not gaunt. He weighs about 165 pounds - 40 less than he did before the incident.

He has scars on his chest and arms, and on the back of his head. He speaks in a soft voice, slowly and deliberately.

It's the same way for his recovery.

"But that's what I've got to do, is go to the gym, go to therapy, get it back as much as I can," he says in a nearly hour-long interview with the Star-Tribune, his first public comments since the dragging. "It's the only thing I can do."

He's living with his parents now, as he works to gain back the body the dragging took from him. His daily routine is simple: Try to get motivated, work out, go to therapy and spend time with his children, Ellie, 7, and Madeline, 5. He can go three or four hours before needing a nap.

Some days are tough. He'll feel horrible and just want to stay in bed.

"You are like, 'What's going on? Why me?' But that's what happened so that's what I've got to deal with."

***

Until the dragging, Irene hadn't even broken a bone.

He grew up in Casper, but moved to Arizona to play golf professionally. After four years, he returned to Wyoming but continued to compete.

That didn't pay the bills, so he got a job operating heavy equipment for an excavation company. He was a strong man, who worked out regularly.

Everything changed after that day in December. He couldn't walk. He couldn't get out of bed. He was in constant pain.

Doctors took his latissimus dorsi, a large muscle in the back, and basically filleted it. They used part of the muscle as a patch for his abdomen.

The medical staff also had to deal with the fluids that were accumulating in his abdomen. The tissue around the wound also curled back and hardened, making it difficult for Irene to move around, or even breathe.

"It's like a big saddle horn inside your stomach," Irene says.

It was difficult for Irene to reconcile just how seriously he was hurt.

"You don't want to realize how bad the injuries are to yourself," he says. "You think you can just recover and walk away."

Family members, meanwhile, were struggling with the scale of his injuries.

"You stay in denial, or shock or disbelief," says Chris DeLauter, his fiancee. "You go through so many different feelings. You can't explain it. You know it's like a lot of people say, 'You wake up and think it is a nightmare that's going to go away.' And it doesn't."

DeLauter's son, Noah DeWitt, saw Irene in the hospital a few days after the dragging.

"It totally made me question hope and everything. It's kind of indescribable," DeWitt says.

The 14-year-old lost his own father at age 7 and Irene has become a father figure to him.

"It was hard to stay hopeful throughout all of it, stay positive, because you are seeing him in that state. But he made it through it."

***

Irene spent 48 days in a coma. He can't recall the emergency room, nor the intensive care unit, where his parents stood at his bedside and his sisters steadfastly maintained, despite his injuries, that he would survive.

Outside the hospital, people followed his story. Police arrested the Tahoe's driver and accused him of being drunk at the time of the incident.

When Irene finally awoke, his family told him what had happened.

"There you are. You're all laid up," he recalls. "Can't move, in pain. Not sure why it happened to you."

He'd suffered massive internal injuries. The dragging tore up the left side of his body and shaved down his ribs. It broke his pelvis and exposed the bones in his hips and knees.

When he first got the news, Irene wasn't sure what to think.

"I guess I didn't believe it," he says. "But I had to believe it because I'm laying there with all of this stuff on me."

He stops and chuckles for a moment.

"Laying in bed and I can't get up. You just got to deal with it, I guess."

***

It wasn't easy.

He spent four months in the hospital and underwent 22 surgeries. For the first several weeks, he remained in intensive care, hooked up to a ventilator.

The medical staff mended his wounds and installed a plate on his pelvis to hold it together. They grafted skin onto his abdomen from other parts of his body.

People rarely survive such injuries. If they manage to live past the initial trauma, they still must face the threat of infection.

Medical staff had to constantly clean and dress Irene's wounds.

"That's how they treated me, like a burn victim," Irene says.

Gradually, he began to heal. The ventilator was removed, and he left intensive care. Two weeks before he left the hospital, he was able to get up and move about.

From Wyoming Medical Center, he was transferred to Elkhorn Valley Rehabilitation Hospital for more treatment. He began working out, walking with a cane and eating three meals a day.

Finally in May, 131 days after the dragging, Irene left the hospital for his parent's home. He most looked forward to a regular bed and not having someone waking him up every few hours.

"Driving around was nice," he adds.

***

A month later, Doug Downs, the Lander man who was drunk and driving the Tahoe when it dragged Irene, appeared in Natrona County District Court. He pleaded guilty to driving under the influence causing serious bodily injury.

A sentencing date for Downs hasn't been set.

He'd been arrested twice on the night of the incident for driving drunk. A few hours before the dragging, a Wyoming Highway Patrol trooper jailed him for driving under the influence. He posted bond just before 1 a.m. and, according to Downs, his bondsman dropped him off at the Sandbar Lounge.

According to police, Downs later told an officer he drank half a beer before driving some friends to an Oak Street home. The exact circumstances remain unclear, but somehow Irene was dragged underneath the Tahoe as Downs drove it from the bar.

Authorities have not said what Irene was doing prior to the incident. His attorney, Todd Ingram, has advised his client not to answer questions related to the incident or to Downs until after the case has been resolved.

"We want to let that happen on its own," Ingram said. "When the time is here, Jeff looks forward to talking about those subjects."

***

Jeff Irene isn't sure how long his recovery will take. Neither, he says, do his doctors. His injuries are too unusual. His body may never fully recover.

"Now that he has gotten through it, we are still taking it one day at a time actually," DeLauter says. "But now we are trying to rebuild him, I guess. Some days it's really exhausting, really tiring."

The hardest part of the whole experience, Irene says, is not being able to do what he did before. He can't hit a golf ball like he used to. He can't pick up his daughters.

"I mean, that really sucks, just getting everything taken away from you," he says.

If there is any upside to all the pain and struggle, it's that the experience has brought Irene's family closer together.

"It made me realize that your family is very important, and you can't take life for granted, because you never know when something like this could happen," Irene says.

He's also learned about the kindness of others. People regularly approach him to say he's been in their prayers.

"That a big motivator in itself, everyone pulling for you," he says. "I need to thank everybody for that."

Life is getting better. The hard spot in his abdomen is getting a little more tender. He's tried golfing again, and managed to hit the ball a little ways. Not like before, but still an accomplishment.

"It's great to feel good," he says. "I was in the hospital for so long, I didn't feel good one day."

Still, there are more surgeries and more treatment. The dragging pushed his belly button over to the side, and doctors will try to return his abdomen to a more natural state.

"And then after that, it will get be getting back to a normal life," he says. "I hope."

He pauses.

"Maybe."

Reach crime reporter Joshua Wolfson at (307) 266-0582 or at josh.wolfson@trib.com.