A widow says she survived being hit by a bus thanks to her dead husband who appeared in a vision telling her to "keep fighting" because there was "no room upstairs".
Carole Attle, 74, suffered horrific injuries after she was knocked down by a single-decker while shopping in Stockton-on-Tees.
She was put into a medically induced coma and rushed to James Cook University Hospital in Middlesbrough after the crash on July 28 last year.
Carole spent five weeks in intensive care where she says her late husband David – who died in 2019 aged 74 – urged her to “keep fighting”.
Carole, from Eaglescliffe, County Durham, said: “I’d been in Matalan and had bought a present for somebody, which my daughter found in the boot of my car.
“After that I know nothing until five weeks later when I woke up in a hospital bed.
“When I was in intensive care I don’t know whether it was real or what it was but I woke up one day and I could have sworn my husband was in bed beside me.
“He was saying basically there’s no room upstairs for you and we don’t want you going to the other place, so get yourself pulled round and fighting and get out of here, and I think I turned a corner after that.”
Carole was bruised from head to toe and suffered a broken eye socket and nose, three smashed ribs and had a bleed on the brain.
Incredibly, despite her horrific injuries, she returned home last October but had a care team for a further nine weeks to help with her recovery.
Her daughter Rebecca Dowson, 50, said she was at work in a library at the same hospital when she was told about her mum’s accident.
She said: “Two officers came for me and then I was escorted over from the library to resus to see my mum.
“I was told the x-rays don’t look good, and they’ve done as much as they can to help her.
“She spent seven weeks in intensive care and two weeks in the trauma ward, and during that time we had at least four difficult conversations where they advised she wasn’t going to make it.
“She’s missed a big chunk of her life and is still coming to terms with it.
“Even daft things, like when I first started doing her shopping for her, she thought I was spending a lot of money, but she didn’t realise the cost of living had gone up so quick.”
