At the age of 19, Claire Farmer was about to make her dreams come true.
“I wanted to travel around the country in my van cleaning beaches,” she said.
“I just care about the environment.”
Claire’s mother, Cherie, said her daughter was about to start her life adventure.
“She renovated a van and started traveling around the country with a conservation group cleaning up beaches,” she said.
But the day before it started, she was driving home from her job at Amazon, and everything changed.
“She was hit. Her car crossed two lanes, went over a curb and down a driveway into a building,” Cherie said.
Cherie says the driver who hit her daughter was traveling at 60 miles per hour in a 56 mile per hour zone.
Claire suffered a traumatic brain injury.
The injury list is frightening.
“Two fractures, one at the back of her skull, one at the front, possibly from her glasses. She had three fractures in her pelvis, and those were the only fractures she had. But the brain injury caused the paralysis on the left side,” Cherie said.
The driver was guilty of assault. That still frustrates Claire: “I was in hospital for 79 days and I will have 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 before the accident: Claire and Cherie lived in a trailer at a campground, and once the disability funds came in, Claire had to live alone in a 300-square-foot apartment.
And federal restrictions on those funds kept the two apart.
“Because if we move in together, they will also count my income. And what they discover is hers. So the fact that I pay her cell phone bill, which is $25 or $50 a month comes out of her income, because it’s in-kind. So I am. So they consider that as income,” Cherie explained.
I asked if all this made her angry. The answer was pure Claire: ‘I do everything I can to get better when I’m not sulking and crying all day. I did that in the beginning.”
Claire’s comeback was underway. She began volunteering at the clothing bank at St. Francis House in Puyallup. She received help finding a job from the Brain Injury Alliance of Washington.
The state eventually withdrew funding from the group.
And while an insurance settlement helped the family buy a house.
Claire is still fighting for her independence and her future.
“And I don’t want any help from any government. For example, I want to be able to 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, just like before the accident,” Claire said.
And Claire gets the chance to start that journey again on a sandy and windy beach of her choice. “And I say to everyone in my family: one of these days, as in my life, I am going to travel the world or country again and finish what I started, whether alone or with a companion. .”
