Everything Val knows about how she got the head injury which changed her life has been told to her by her friends. She remembers nothing of it.
On February 19th, 1991, the 26-year-old agency nurse drove into Dublin city centre for drinks with her friends. They took a taxi from the pub to a nightclub but later she drove home.
"One hundred metres from my house I crashed it into a garden wall. I was knocked unconscious. I spent three months in Beaumont of which I have no memory at all. I was in a coma for four weeks."
She went from Beaumont to St John of God's and from there to the National Rehabilitation Hospital. "I really thought it was silly," she says. "I didn't see the need for it." She did not believe a psychologist who explained that her memory had been impaired. "I was a paediatric and general nurse prior to the accident and I was desperate to return to my job," she says. "They got me a position in a nursing home. I went as a nurses' aide. I thought if I started as a nurses' aide I would prove to everybody I was capable of it. It took me a year to cop on it was not working for me."
The nursing home had more than 30 residents, and remembering their names took an enormous effort, even after a year there.
She moved on to childcare work with Barnardos, which she enjoyed so much she went to DIT Rathmines to do a childcare course.
But "when I did the exams I failed three of them. I repeated and got one and failed two again. I was distressed and frustrated. After pushing myself in the class it hadn't worked for me. I thought I was mastering this head injury and that I had put it behind me. Now I had to reassess my whole life."
She decided all she could do was "just go with the flow". Now she is doing a computer course.
A decade after her accident she has finally accepted her limitations, but it has not been easy.
"The last 10 years," she says, "seem like 50."