Woman wakes from coma to find fiancé ghosted her and moved on with someone else

8 June 2022, 08:47 | Updated: 8 June 2022, 09:14

A woman has revealed she woke from a three month coma after a horror accident in Canada to discover her fiancé had blocked her on social media and moved on with another woman.

Brie Duval, then 25, who is from Australia but was living in Canada, was out with friends when she fell from a 10m retaining wall outside a rooftop bar and crashed headfirst into the pavement on 29 August.

She was flown to the University of Alberta Hospital with a brain injury and several broken bones and placed in an induced coma.

Doctors gave Duval only a 10 per cent chance of survival but her parents refused to allow the hospital to turn off life support.

Three weeks later, Duval started making slow signs of improvements and three months after the accident, she woke up.

But she experienced amnesia and did not begin to remember her life before the accident, including her fiancé, for another two months.

Duval was then handed back her phone and tried to get in touch with her partner, who had not been to visit her since the accident.

"I opened my phone going to message him when a message pops up from this woman that says I am now with [partner's name]. I have moved him out. He's now living with me and my son, please do not contact him," she told the Mirror.

Duval's partner, who has not been named, had also blocked her on all his social media accounts.

She said: "I have not heard from him since I have been in hospital, he's completely and utterly left me in the dust. So I don't even have closure as to why this happened."

Duval also spent her recovery without her parents who were denied a request to leave Australia for Canada to see their daughter.

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Australian citizens were not allowed to leave or enter the country during the height of Covid-19 restrictions without special permission.

"[Canadian doctors] told my mum that I had a 10 per cent chance of living and that she should get over to Canada as soon as she could because things weren't looking good," Duval said.

"This was in the peak of Covid, so in Australia, you weren't allowed to leave or enter the country.

"My mum and dad went to the government and asked for special permission to say goodbye to me as things were bad at that point. They refused them, they would not give them a chance and they would not give them a reason, they just flat out said no.

"So my Mum told doctors in Canada to keep my life support on and do not under any circumstances turn that off, which they had to medically abide by."

She added that seeing her parents would have helped "massively" with her recovery.

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Duval has since moved back to Australia to be close to family and friends.

She said: "Seeing them would have helped. I struggled heavily, I had a near-death experience. I was confused, I was scared, and I would quite literally cry every single day.

"It was definitely something I never want to live through again and I don't want to be apart from my family again."

Duval was kept company in hospital by her best friend Sam, who drove an eight-hour round trip every weekend to see her, and Sam's mum, Sandy.

She said: "Sandy used to come and visit me every day as she lived in the city, she'd make sure I had everything I need as I didn't have my actual mum with me. She'd stay for hours, play board games and keep in contact with my mum.

"She was right in the thick of it."

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Duval has been sharing her recovery from the traumatic brain injury on her TikTok channel.

She said: "It's been very hard mentally, there's definitely a bit of PTSD from everything that has happened, I'm just trying to sort through my emotions, going through the accident and then having that letdown of a relationship.

"Getting back to normal life, just trying to establish what my new normal is - I couldn't swallow when I first woke up, I've had to try and learn how to walk again, from my waist down to my toes, it feels like it's gone dead. All my muscle was just completely lost as I was laying in bed.

"It's frustrating not being able to do the things I want to do, my mental clarity is nowhere near where it used to be, I've got brain fogginess.

"Having a TBI is kind of like having concussion symptoms that are continuing. They don't go away.

"It's a struggle because the thing is, you're not visibly disabled. Like visibly you would look at me and think I was in perfect physical, and mental health.

"I don't look like I have a brain injury but it's a huge part of my life. I'm struggling every single day to function and do simple things that I used to do."