IT’S a shock to see Nick Verron walk downstairs into his living room, each step a swaying stagger. It’s partly the shock of seeing someone in the flesh after reading about them since they were nearly killed.

But it’s also the shock of seeing him doing something the doctors thought he could never do, through his iron will and his family’s love.

Nick was 25 when he was stabbed in the brain.

He was on a night out in July 2009 when a 17-year-old armed with a screwdriver attacked him in Boscombe’s Roumelia Lane.

His family was told to say their goodbyes before his life support machine was switched off, but then he started to breathe for himself.

His mum Sue Vincent was warned he would be left little more than “a happy two year old” and would never walk again.

Yet today, and every day, Nick Verron is fighting to prove those predictions wrong.

“He is breaking all the rules at the moment,” says Sue, 52, her face a mix of pride and pain as she sits with him. “But we just don’t know how far he can go.”

Nick endlessly practises basic actions like reading and writing and puts himself through a gruelling exercise regime for up to 10 hours a day. He can now walk 1km on a treadmill – which takes an hour.

“That makes me drip with sweat,” says Nick, 26. “The exertion it takes is just unreal.”

When he first left hospital his muscles were so weak he could not sit up straight without falling over. Yet in October, he returned to the specialist unit that treated him, and astonished reception staff by walking in with a frame.

“The receptionist didn’t recognise him at first,” says Sue. “After he walked past she gave me two big thumbs up and said ‘amazing’.”

Nick’s speech is slow and slurred but gets better all the time. His vocabulary is sharp and precise – his mind mercifully survived intact.

The same could not be said of his body.

His left eye was cross-eyed. The right side of his body was paralysed. His hand was twisted into a claw, his foot twisted inwards. He couldn’t wiggle his toes, let along hold a pen and write. He faced spending the rest of his life in his living room, unable to wash himself or communicate. Through exercise, stretches, practice and sheer perseverance he made progress on all those problems.

And the healing process literally changed the way he thinks.

“It’s called Neuroplasticity,” says Nick. “You take a bit of your brain that’s not been used, and reassign to it what the damaged part was doing.

“You are almost teaching your brain from scratch like a child.”

The attack has also changed his outlook on life. He is more understanding of other people, less the thrusting young professional.

Before the attack Nick was living in Boscombe and earning more than £36,000 a year as a star salesman for Poseidon Telecom Services Ltd, of Ferndown. His ambition was then to earn as much money as he could – now it is to travel the world and one-day live independently again.

One of Nick’s biggest hurdles is a mental one – regaining the self-confidence to face the world and not feeling like a ‘freak’.

Sue says: “Bear in mind he was a super self-confident young man before to the point of arrogance. Now he is ashamed of how he is, and that makes me so angry, because he has got no reason to be.”

Nick now lives at home in Waddesdon, in Buckinghamshire, and the fall-out from the attack has put a great strain on his family.

Sue had to quit work and she recently put the wedding dress she had bought on eBay – her relationship with her partner is at crisis point.

Nick has been left with emotions that are either high or low.

“As a salesman, I perfected an image of serenity and I didn’t show any sort of reactions,” he says. “But now I can’t hide my emotions for love nor money.”

His attacker was jailed for seven years in the spring. Some of Nick’s injuries will never get better. He has double vision and what he does see bounces up and down. But he fights to improve anything he can, often with makeshift devices.

He stretches the tendons in his hands and foot and uses an electrical abdominizer to exercise the muscles that lift his feet.

He has rigged up a foam back support to a set of crutches, and uses luggage straps to keep |himself in place on a cross trainer.

He is considering campaigning for more help for people who suffer injuries and starting a website to pass on his tricks to other people with brain injuries.

“The message would be stay positive, there’s light at the end of the tunnel,” he says, “but without perseverance you are lost.”

He added: “I don’t know what timeframe to expect, but I am going to walk unaided again as soon as possible. We have been told by the experts I will never do that, but I am not taking that as an answer.”