A man who was involved in a car crash almost ten years ago, leaving him “too angry to work”, has been awarded a £4 million payout, the Metro reports.
Paul Vallance, now 27, was 18 at the time of the incident. Insurers and lawyers initially said that he had suffered only a mild head injury and therefore he received only a small amount of compensation.
However, upon his return to work as a trainee manager at a motorway service station, it became apparent that the full extent of Vallance’s injuries may have not have been realised.
An undiagnosed brain injury left him unable to exercise self-control or use appropriate language, which saw him fired from his job and several other subsequent positions in retail that followed.
Vallance’s mother, Tina Collins, was convinced that the initial diagnosis of her son’s injuries was inaccurate and launched an eight-year legal battle, which ended with successfully proving he had suffered debilitating brain damage as a result of the crash back in April 2006.
The £4 million compensation, paid by the other driver’s insurance firm, will pay for the lifelong rehabilitation, care and support that her son now needs.
Collins, 46, explained how Vallance was convinced that he had undergone a change of character. “He would spend hours just staring at himself in a mirror, saying repeatedly: ‘I look like Paul, but I don’t feel like Paul’. My heart was in bits seeing him like this,” she said.
Collins added that the judgement from the High Court has allowed her son to begin to come to terms with his injuries and he is now in a specialist care unit in Wigan in Lancashire for treatment.
