Three weeks before the crash, a video captured Jade Almond running up and down stairs for the first time in nearly eight months. She was 16, she was laughing, and she had just walked out of what was supposed to be her final physiotherapy session. The footage made the rounds. People who had followed her recovery watched it over and over.

Then came February 21.

How It Started the First Time

Jade's story began not with a dramatic accident, but with a chair. In the summer of 2018, during a Duke of Edinburgh Award project in Hindley, she hit her head after falling back off a chair. What followed was months of being unable to walk, suffering uncontrollable shakes, and eventually being diagnosed with functional neurological disorder, a condition where the brain fails to send the right signals to the body.

Jade had been a goalkeeper for Wigan Athletic Ladies youth team. She was athletic, competitive, physically capable. FND took all of that away without warning. There is no standard NHS treatment pathway that covers the intensive physiotherapy FND patients often need, so her family turned to crowdfunding. Supporters raised £14,500 to cover seven months of private treatment.

It worked. She learned to walk again. She danced. She went for a run with her physio. By February, she was being officially discharged.

The Drive Home

Jade was in the car with her mother Michelle, her sister Josie, and two friends. They were on the M60, near junction 18, heading home from the appointment that was supposed to close that chapter of her life. It was around 4:20 in the afternoon.

A car hit them from behind. The family later told reporters the female driver had been leaning over to pick up popcorn from the floor of her car when she ploughed into them.

Jade knew something was wrong almost immediately. She tried to reach over to comfort one of her friends and found she couldn't move her right arm. When she attempted to get out of the car, her legs gave way beneath her. From the elbow down on her right side, she had lost all sensation. Both legs were numb and weak. She had no sitting balance. Her core and her neck were too weak to support her.

Back to Square One

Jade was seen first in Leigh, then transferred to Salford Royal Hospital, and later recovered at Wigan Infirmary. The physical progress she had spent seven months building, funded by thousands of strangers who believed in her, had been erased in a single collision on a motorway in the late afternoon.

The family launched a second appeal for funding to cover another round of rehabilitation. Jade Almond, who had already relearned how to walk once, now faced doing it all over again.