A car accident changes a teenager's life forever

At 19 years old, Claire Farmer was making her dreams come true.

“I wanted to travel around the country in my van and clean up beaches,” she said.

“I just care about the environment.”

Claire's mother Cherie said her daughter was about to embark on the adventure of a lifetime.

“She was renovating a van and wanted to travel around the country with a conservation group and clean up beaches,” she said.

But the day before it started, she took a turn on the way home from her job at Amazon and everything changed.

“She was hit. Her car crossed two lanes of traffic, went over a curb and down a driveway into a building,” Cherie said.

Cherie says the driver who hit her daughter was going 63 miles per hour in a 35 mile per hour zone.

Claire suffered a traumatic brain injury.

The list of injured people is shocking.

“Two fractures, one at the back of the skull, one at the front, perhaps from her glasses. She had three pelvic fractures and those were the only fractures she had. But the brain injury caused the left side paralysis,” Cherie said.

The driver pleaded guilty to vehicular assault. This still frustrates Claire: “I was in hospital for 79 days and I will live with it for the rest of my life. And she only had five days in jail.”

Her life has been uprooted. Claire needed full-time care and was paid little to no money.

Claire and Cherie were underinsured for the accident – they lived in a trailer at a campsite, and when disability benefits came in, Claire had to live alone in a 32 square meter apartment.

And federal restrictions on those funds kept the two apart.

“Because if we move in together, my income will be included in that. And what they find out is hers. The fact that I pay her cell phone bill means that $25 or $50 a month is deducted from her income because it's in kind. So I am. So they look at that as income,” Cherie explained.

I asked if any of this made her angry. The answer was pure Claire: “I'm doing everything I can to get better when I'm not just sulking and crying all day. I did that at the beginning.”

Claire's comeback was underway. She began volunteering at the clothing bank at St. Francis House in Puyallup. She received help finding work from the Brain Injury Alliance of Washington.

The state eventually withdrew funding from the group.

And although an insurance agreement helped the family buy a house.

Claire is still fighting for her independence and her future.

“And I don't want any help from a government. I want to be able to be on my own and not rely on food stamps and SSI and SSDI. It's like I want to feel. I want to be as independent as I was before the accident,” said Claire.

And Claire gets the chance to restart this journey on a sandy and windy beach of her choice. “And I tell everyone in my family: one of these days, as in my life, I will travel the world or the country again and finish what I started, whether alone or with a companion.”