By New York Post (World News) | Created at 2026-08-05 13:21:11 | Updated at 2026-08-05 18:46:23
5 hours ago
A mom of two has been left with a serious brain injury after she sleepwalked off her balcony while on vacation in Paris — and plunged 40 feet to the courtyard below.
Raina Heverin, 44, fell from an open third-floor window on April 26 last year and was found lying in the courtyard the next morning by her brother, who initially thought she was asleep, BBC reported.
“I was very disoriented, I hadn’t slept the night before,” Liverpool-born Heverin told the outlet Monday, recounting the horror fall.
“There was a Juliet balcony in the room. I think I was sleepwalking; maybe I was disoriented. I fell out of the window… three storeys into the courtyard.”
The mom told the Liverpool Echo that she didn’t remember returning to the rental property on the day of her accident.
“I remember walking down the street, but I must have blanked out, so I don’t remember anything up to that point,” she said.
Heverin fell after swapping bedrooms with her relatives.
She was left with a broken arm, broken hip, and a bleed on her brain stem that affected her speech and movement.
She was in a coma for almost three weeks, “unable to breathe without machines keeping her alive,” a fundraiser said.
“The next thing I remember is waking up in the hospital and Michael, my husband, reading a terrible book,” she told the Echo.
“I remember him reading that and thinking, ‘what is he doing reading me this nonsense?'”
While Heverin was hospitalized, her brother and sister-in-law were quizzed by French cops about the plunge.
She returned to the UK in June last year and has been at a brain injury rehab hospital since November.
“Raina returned incredibly weak, unable to stand, and needing to learn how to talk and walk again. She needed help with even the most basic of tasks,” her friend Rachel Bryan said in a fundraiser she created.
Heverin was diagnosed with ataxia — a neurological disease that is relatively rare, according to the University of Florida Health.
Around 150,000 people in the US are affected by ataxia. It can impact balance, hand coordination, speech and eye movements.
Heverin has told how relatively basic tasks have become more challenging.
“Everything is difficult because I have tremors in my hands,” she told the BBC.
“Even putting on makeup or having a cup of coffee. Just every day things you take for granted are so difficult.”
Heverin, an exercise-mad mom, told how her life has been turned upside down since her fall.
“I was a mom, I was an entrepreneur, I had two businesses. I was juggling a lot of things,” she said.
“I love being a mom, I loved taking them to school and just everyday things like asking them, how their day was, putting them to bed, giving them cuddles, all the normal stuff.
“I’m grieving still my old life. There’s loads of changes to adapting to [a] brain injury.
“But I’m definitely still grieving at the moment.”
She has since walked three miles over five days to raise money for charity and is now striving to achieve the feat in one day.
“If you work hard and you try, you’ll get somewhere closer to who you used to be,” she said.
