LUCKY TO be alive, that’s how Brechin woman Nicola Keetley feels after a horrific car accident eight years ago when a tractor drove over the top of her mini car crushing her inside and causing her multiple injuries.

At one point while in a coma, doctors at Ninewells Hospital in Dundee told her parents Nicola was severely brain damaged and was unlikely to ever walk or talk again.

However, after several years of recuperation and care at Royal Victoria Hospital, Dundee, 27-year-old former nanny Nicola has made a remarkable recovery.

Although still disabled, she will fulfil a lifetime ambition and complete a tandem parachute jump on Sunday, September 7, at Errol airfield.

She has been sponsored by people all over Brechin and beyond and so far has raised over £1200 which will be divided between the brain injury rehabilitation unit at the Royal Victoria and the Macmillan day care centre in the grounds of Stracathro Hospital.

It was September 7, 1999, when Nicola was driving home from work in Montrose that her mini was hit by a tractor and trailer loaded with straw bales.

She was on the A935 Montrose to Brechin road when the tractor turned across her path to gain access to Gilrivie farm. It took many months of hard work and rehabilitation therapy to get Nicola to the stage where she could get home from hospital, though she will never work again and her dream of opening her own children’s nursery has been shattered.

But given the brave battle she has put up so far, she is unlikely to take cold feet when it comes to plunging out of an aeroplane thousands of feet up in the air with only her instructor and parachute for comfort, and she will have her next door neighbour Greig Safian, an ex-paratrooper, also jumping to boost her confidence.

Anybody who would like to sponsor Nicola on her parachute jump, can contact her on 0792-817-1127.