WATERFORD, Vt. (AP) – Ginger Aldrich is home with her parents and recovering from what doctors said would be a fatal coma.

She suffered carbon monoxide poisoning Jan. 30 at the Redstone Apartment Complex in Burlington, where she lived. Her boyfriend, Jeffrey Hill Rodliff, died and eight others were injured in a leak that was triggered when a boiler backfired and blew out a section of ventilation pipe.

When Aldrich awoke in April, doctors still had little hope for her.

“They told me I was going to be a vegetable. They said I was going to be blind,” Aldrich said.

She had a blood saturation level of 65 to 70 percent carboxyhemoglobin, or COHb, which is a measure of the carbon monoxide in a patient’s body, said Greg Aldrich, her father.

Anything over 25 percent is very serious and surviving levels above 50 percent is extremely rare, said Dr. Norman Yanossky, chief of Emergency Medicine at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, N.H.

A team of specialists at Sacre-Coeur Hospital in Montreal told Greg Aldrich they had never seen anybody live with a COHb level higher than 65 percent. Aldrich was flown to the Canadian hospital for emergency treatment in a hyperbaric chamber three times a day.

The pressurized chamber forces pure oxygen into the patient’s system to displace CO from the hemoglobin, said Yanossky.

In Montreal somebody was always by the young woman’s side, Greg said.

Members of Rodliff’s family even made the trip to be with her.

“Jeff’s family has been very wonderful,” Ginger said.

She spent five days at Sacre-Coeur before her parents moved her to the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center.

Greg Aldrich felt the Montreal doctors had too little hope for his daughter and said the language barrier was difficult to overcome.

“We wanted people to be aggressive in saving her,” he said.

U.S. Customs officers refused to let the emergency-medical jet Ginger was traveling in enter the country. She had no identification and officers refused to accept a faxed copy of her birth certificate, Greg Aldrich said.

He called Gov. Jim Douglas. He promised Ginger would be in New Hampshire the next day and she was.

She later spent time at the Fanny Allen Rehabilitation in Colchester, learning basic things like how to sit up and talk again, and then continued her recovery at home in Waterford.

She recently has gone to the movies and on April 20 went out to eat to celebrate her 24th birthday.

She is proud of her accomplishments and attributes her progress to will power, family, friends and an outpouring of community support.

“I can’t wait to go back to Montreal,” to the hospital where she was first taken. “That way they won’t give up on anybody else,” she said.

AP-ES-04-30-05 1213EDT