At 19, Claire Farmer was about to live her dreams.
“I wanted to travel the country in my van, cleaning up beaches,” she said.
“I just care about the environment.”
Claire’s mother, Cherie, said her daughter was about to start her life’s adventure.
“She renovated a van and was going to travel the country with a conservation group and clean up beaches,” she said.
But the day before it began, she made a turn driving home from her job at Amazon, and everything changed.
“She was hit. Her car traveled over two lanes of traffic, went over a curb, down a driveway into a building,” Cherie said.
Cherie says the driver who hit her daughter was traveling at 63 miles per hour in a 35-mile-per-hour zone.
Claire suffered a traumatic brain injury.
The list of injuries is frightening.
“Two fractures, one in the back of her skull, one in the front, maybe from her glasses. She had three fractures in her pelvis, and then that was the only breaks that she had. But the brain injury caused the left side paralysis, “Cherie said.
The driver plead guilty to vehicular assault. That still frustrates Claire, “I had 79 days in the hospital, and I’m going to live with this for the rest of my life. And she only had five days in jail.”
Their lives were uprooted. Claire needed full-time care with little or no money coming in.
Underinsured for the accident-Claire and Cherie lived in a trailer in a campground, and then once disability funds came in-Claire had to live alone in a 360-square-foot apartment.
And federal limits on those funds kept the two apart.
“Because if we move in together, then they include my income. And what they figure out is hers. So the fact that I pay her cell phone bill, that $25 or $50 a month comes off of what her income is because it’s in-kind. So I’m. So they take that as income coming in,” Cherie explained.
I asked if any of this made her angry. The answer was pure Claire: “I’m doing all I can to get better if I’m not just kind of sulking and crying all day. I already did that in the beginning.”
Claire’s comeback was underway. She began volunteering at the clothing bank at St. Francis House in Puyallup. She was getting help to find a job from the Brain Injury Alliance of Washington.
The state eventually pulled funding from the group.
And though an insurance settlement has helped the family purchase a home.
Claire’s still fighting for her independence and her future.
“And I don’t want any help from a government. Like, I want to be able to, like, be on my own and not have to rely on food stamps and SSI and SSDI. It’s like I want to feel. I want to be independent like I was before the accident,” Claire said.
And Claire will get the chance to restart that journey on a sandy and windy beach of her choosing. “And I tell everyone of my family like, I’m one of these days, like in my life, I’m going to go travel the world or the country again and finish what I started, whether that’s by myself or with a companion.”
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