A Newcastle man who had to learn to walk and talk again after spending four months in a coma following a car accident has issued a warning to young drivers. Michael Thompson had been driving for four years when he collided with another car on a winding road that he knew ‘like the back of my hand’ when he was 21.
Michael, 32, said: “I passed my driving test when I was 17 in three months. After that, I drove all over the country for work, day in and day out, at all hours of the day. Driving was my life and cars were a real passion of mine.” But he hit an oncoming car and was left trapped, unconscious and catastrophically injured, before being airlifted to hospital, with multiple broken bones and severe brain damage following the collision in 2014.
Michael suffered from a diffuse axonal brain injury; the tearing of the brain’s long connecting nerve fibres which occurs when the brain shifts and rotates inside the skull after impact. He has no memory of the four months that he spent in a coma and he spent another six months in hospital afterwards, re-learning how to walk, talk, eat and dress himself. He’s been left with a speech problem, vision loss, memory issues and with many other implications from the brain injury.
“I have a rod in my leg, and I had an ex-fix – a device that keeps bones in place so they can heal and grow – in my arm. I had five years of dental treatment and facial reconstruction. I had to have my eye socket and jaw reattached. I also had a tooth stuck in my airway, which eventually caused blood in my lungs – as it was stuck in my lung. It had to be removed with two operations.
“The impact of the crash didn’t just affect me – it changed my parents’ lives too. That’s why it’s so important that we look deeper beyond the words “drive safely”. My mam used to have her own business which she had to give up to care for me, as I needed 24-hour care at first and had various mental and physical problems. My dad had to work a 4-day week to help. As a result, they have to take me everywhere. Their lives have to revolve around mine. But much of their recovery is down to them.
“At the time of the accident, I was working full-time for a company in Gateshead where I did new-build regulations testing. I had also just bought my first house. The accident turned me from an independent young man who did everything himself, to someone who needed help to do everything again,” he said.
Michael is grateful to the support of brain injury association Headway Tyneside, who he said ‘massively supported me on the social side as all my friends disappeared’.
Research from Admiral Car Insurance shows that young drivers are twice as likely to be involved in serious accidents compared to older drivers, and the latest data from the Department for Transport also found that a fifth of all killed or seriously injured casualties from collisions involving cars involved a young car driver. Young male drivers aged 17 to 24 are four times as likely to be killed or seriously injured compared with motorists aged over 25.
Michael now wants other drivers to learn from his mistakes and has issued a plea for others to drive safely.
“My advice to young people driving is remember; you don’t know everything. I thought I knew everything and could drive anywhere and look at what happened. Even on the road where my accident was, I knew it like the back of my hand. Anything can happen. Please watch your speed and be aware of other drivers and road users,” he says.