I lost a leg after being crushed by a lorry. I cried a lot – then got on with building a new life

Victoria Lebrec forgave the driver who almost killed her. Nine years on, she is happy, active, at peace with her changed body. But she is still fighting to make the roads safer

Victoria Lebrec can’t be sure if what she knows about 8 December 2014 is from her own memory, or the BBC video cameras that captured her bleeding heavily at the side of the road, tyre marks visible across her crushed pelvis from the lorry that knocked her from her bicycle. Or maybe what she knows is from the CCTV footage that was reviewed first as evidence in a criminal case and then in a gruelling, victim-blaming struggle for the compensation she urgently needed. How else would she buy the £70,000 prosthetic leg her injuries required? And how else could she find closure and move on in her changed reality and changed body?

It was a Monday morning. Lebrec – now 33, then 24 – was cycling to work in London on a busy stretch of road that she knew well. “I was next to a skip lorry and he only indicated as he was turning, so I didn’t see that he was about to turn. The police investigation concluded that he hadn’t looked in his mirrors for 13 seconds leading up to the crash. He would’ve seen me had he looked,” she says.