A mother is determined to overcome the challenges she has been facing since sustaining a life-changing brain injury on vacation.

In April 2025, Raina Heverin fell out of a third-floor balcony window while sleepwalking in the rental accommodation she was staying at with her brother and sister-in-law in Paris, the BBC and Liverpool Echo reported.

Her brother initially thought she was sleeping when he found her lying in the courtyard below in the early hours of the next day. However, he soon realized she had fallen and rushed her to the hospital, where she remained in a coma for three weeks.

“I was very disoriented. I hadn’t slept the night before,” Heverin, 44, recalled to the BBC in an interview published on Aug. 3. “There was a Juliet balcony in the room. I think I was sleepwalking, maybe I was disoriented. I fell out of the window… three stories into the courtyard.”

The mother of two from Liverpool, England, said her brother and sister-in-law were questioned by police about the incident.

Her parents and husband, Michael, were “very traumatized” once they received her brother’s call about the accident.

“I remember the whole day, but I don’t remember going back to the house,” Heverin recalled to the Liverpool Echo. “I remember walking down the street, but I must have blanked out, so I don’t remember anything up to that point.”

“The next thing I remember is waking up in the hospital and Michael, my husband, reading a terrible book. I remember him reading that and thinking, ‘What is he doing reading me this nonsense?’ ” she added.

Heverin had been a “busy” mom of two young children who juggled two businesses with daily exercise before waking up from a coma with a life-changing brain injury.

According to the Liverpool Echo, she had bought a new pair of running shoes the day before the accident with plans to go sightseeing with her siblings.

“I used to cycle quite a lot, run, lift weights, do burpees and [take] classes. I swear, while I hate them, they saved my life,” she told the BBC. “[A doctor] said that if I wasn’t so fit I wouldn’t have survived.”

“I’m grieving still my old life,” she added. “There’s loads of changes to adapting to brain injury.”

Heverin was diagnosed with ataxia, a neurological condition affecting coordination and muscle movement, the BBC reported. She also had a bleed in part of her brain and symptoms of polytrauma, a condition where a person sustains multiple traumatic injuries to different body or organ systems.

“I couldn’t walk. I had to relearn that, and I’m still learning. My talking has been affected,” Heverin told the Liverpool Echo. “I have tremors in my hands, so I’m very limited as to what I can do with my right hand. Carrying things is quite hard.”