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Home / Lifestyle

Australian woman's fiancee leaves her while she is in coma

news.com.au
8 Jun, 2022 09:57 PM5 mins to read

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Brie has since moved back home to Australia to be close to her family as she continues to recover. Photo / TikTok/hotcomagirl1

Brie has since moved back home to Australia to be close to her family as she continues to recover. Photo / TikTok/hotcomagirl1

An Australian woman has gone viral after she revealed how her fiance left her for another woman while she was in a coma for three months.

Brie Duval, 25, was living in Canada when things took a horrific turn on August 29, 2020.

Brie was out with friends when she fell off a 10m retaining wall, crashing headfirst on to the pavement.

The 25-year-old was left with a brain injury and several broken bones and was flown to the University of Alberta Hospital where she was placed on life support in the ICU.

Brie's parents refused to turn off her life support and she miraculously began to show signs of improvement, waking up after three months.

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Brie had also suffered from post-traumatic amnesia, forgetting "simple things" like her passwords and address and ended up remaining in hospital for around five months in total.

But once she was able to remember day-to-day things, she was given back her phone – and her first thought was to call her fiance as he hadn't been to see her in hospital.

That's when she discovered her boyfriend of four years had moved in with another woman.

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In a TikTok that has been viewed two million times, Brie explained that when she went to call him for the first time after "finally" waking up from her coma, she found a text on her phone from another woman.

"[It said] 'Blah blah blah has moved in with me and moved out of your house and now we are together, [so] do not contact him,'" Brie said in the clip.

He also blocked Brie on all his social media accounts with the young woman claiming she hadn't heard from her former fiance now in 11 months.

"He doesn't care that you nearly died with a 10 per cent chance of living, but you know, at least he's happy," she continued.

Brie's video was immediately flooded with thousands of comments from TikTok users also shocked by her fiance's actions.

"Sounds like not only did you survive a horrible fall, you also dodged a bullet," one person wrote.

"Well isn't the new lady a lucky woman. You dodged a bullet love," another said.

Overwhelmed by all the support, Brie jumped into the comments section to thank viewers.

"Thank you all for this support! I've had such a hard time and all of this love means the world," she wrote.

She also added she didn't think "in a million years this would go viral".

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It prompted her to share several other videos, with one clarifying how exactly she fell.

"Thank you everyone for the love on my first video … secondly I would like to clarify that I did not fall off a rooftop bar, I fell off a 10m retaining wall across from the bar," she said.

"So I did still plummet headfirst into concrete and go into a coma, I just wasn't on a rooftop bar. I just said that because it was easier in the story to say rooftop bar."

Brie told The Mirror her fiance had completely and utterly left her in the dust.

"So I don't even have closure as to why this happened," she said.

If the news of her fiance wasn't bad enough, given her freak accident happened at the height of the Covid pandemic, her parents were unable to visit her in Canada, due to restrictions in Australia.

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"They 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," she told The Mirror.

"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."

Brie told the publication the incident made her realise she never wants to be apart from her family again and she has since moved back to Australia to be near them.

"Not only was it a physical thing that happened, it affected my mental health severely," Brie said in a TikTok about the horror accident.

While Brie's parents were unable to be by her side, she had the support of her best friend Sam who drove eight hours each weekend to visit Brie. Sam's mum Sandy also lived closer to the hospital, so she would visit Brie daily.

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"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," Brie told The Mirror.

"She'd stay for hours, play board games and keep in contact with my mum. She was right in the thick of it."

The recovery process for Brie is ongoing as she continues to learn to live with a traumatic brain injury (TBI).

"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," she told the publication.

"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."

She continues to share videos to raise awareness of what it's like to live with a TBI.

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