“What on earth has happened?”
Sharon was walking to work when a speeding car slammed into her and drove off. She woke up in hospital with a broken arm, a broken leg, two broken collarbones, eight broken ribs, a fractured neck, a collapsed lung and a bleed on the brain.
A car came speeding around the corner on the wrong side of the road, hit the curb, knocked me over, left me and drove off.
An ambulance was called and her serious injuries meant that she was rushed to hospital. When she finally woke up, she was in a state of shock.
“I couldn’t see anybody I knew beside me,” she says. “I thought, ‘Oh my God! What on earth has happened?’”
Sharon’s niece Kerry was called to the hospital and was shocked by what she saw: “She was in a horrendous state in intensive care. We kept saying that she’d get through it, that we’d get her through it.”
Sharon underwent three major operations. After each one, her recovery was uncertain. Although she survived, the journey ahead was long and demanding. She spent four months in hospital, seven months bedbound and 11 months unable to walk.
“I was aware of MIB,” says Kerry, “so I knew that they had a compensation plan in place. They came back to me and said that they would be able to help us.”
“When I came out of hospital, I was given six sessions of physio on the NHS – 15 minutes every, three weeks” Sharon explains, “whereas MIB arranged one-hour appointments, three times a week.”
“Everything was in place,” Kerry adds. “The appointments were there; the travelling was all arranged. It was all in place, we just had to turn up.”
“Sharon couldn’t get on public transport, there was no way. When you’ve got those injuries, you can’t get on a bus, you can’t get on the Underground – the safest way to travel for Sharon was to be in a taxi. MIB paid for all of that.
At the beginning, Kerry didn’t know what the future would hold for her aunt. But as the support fell into place, reassurance followed.
“Without that private physio, Sharon would never be where she is today and if it wasn’t for MIB she wouldn’t be sitting there. I’m just so grateful, so grateful for that.”
Every 20 minutes, someone in the UK is the victim of an uninsured or hit-and-run driver. MIB exists to protect people from the devastation of uninsured and hit-and-run driving. We make roads safer by getting uninsured and hit-and-run drivers off our roads. And until that’s accomplished, we’re here to compensate victims, like Sharon, quickly, fairly and compassionately.
