Woman wakes from coma to find 'boyfriend' next to her – then discovers terrifying truth
Suddenly discovering that you have a "boyfriend" you don't recognise after coming out of a coma might sound like something you might see in Hollywood's latest romantic comedy. But for writer Brooke Knisley, the bizarre experience "turned into more of a horror film".In 2015, Brooke had a major accident while climbing a tree that left her with life-changing injuries. She explained: "The friend I was with on that fateful day said I had only had two beers. I can't confirm or deny this because I have no memory of my fall or the entire day that preceded it."She had fallen more than 20 feet, sustaining a devastating brain injury that caused lasting difficulties with her balance, eyesight and — most significantly — her memory. But as traumatic as Brooke’s accident had been, the events that followed were even stranger: baffling, scary and deeply disturbing.Brooke told the The Sex That Changed My Life podcast that, after waking from a 10-day coma, the first thing she saw a man standing by her hospital bed. He told her: "I've been telling the doctors and everyone that you're my girlfriend, is that OK?"Brooke, still suffering significant memory loss from her injuries, thought the man looked vaguely familiar but wasn't sure if she'd actually been dating him. When she asked him for an explanation, he replied: "Well, we were never together together, but we are. So I'm just telling everyone, you're my girlfriend now."Naturally enough, Brooke "felt weird about it," but was still in too confused and unwell a state to put up much of an argument.Over the following weeks, this man became a regular visitor to Brooke's bedside although, she adds, he would often take advantage of her memory issues to claim he had been visiting when in fact he hadn't.While he insisted that he was trying to help Brooke with her recovery, his priorities seemed more to do with her appearance than her well-being. She continued: "When I was trying to do logic puzzles to try to make my brain work again, and reading and stuff, he was like 'Maybe you should focus on shaving and getting rid of body hair'."Brooke explained that she is quite hairy, compared to most women, and that for all the time she was in hospital no one was paying much attention to her personal grooming.She recalled: "Whenever he got off work, he would come over to my parents' house and pick me up and take me to salons and ask them to wax my face...it was terrible."Because Brooke also has quite sensitive skin, the waxing treatments would often leave her face blotchy and swollen. However, she had been left with severe vision problems by her accident and so when the beauty therapist showed her the results in the mirror she struggled to understand them.She explained: "I had double vision, but the second image of my double vision was rotated. So it was vertically stacked and the top image was rotated."And all the time, the man was trying to convince Brooke, and her parents, that they had been in a relationship. She continued: "I felt weird about it. It felt strange. Even the way he was telling me about the clipped version of our interactions... at that point, I did remember certain interactions with him from the past. And it did corroborate with what he was saying, that we had been like kind of involved."There was also very little in the way of physical affection from the man. Brooke continued: "I don't have a great history with dating and being involved with people. I was joking around and saying I'm a battered woman because I've been in relationships with people that were abusive in a different sense than this, which is heavily psychological. And so that type of interaction to me at the time, seemed healthy."It didn't seem bad. And also I'm just in general, I'm not really an affectionate person. So the fact that he wasn't super affectionate didn't strike me as strange."Brooke's closest friend had been out of the country at the time of he accident, and was surprised to learn of this new man in her life. After Brooke had told her about his behaviour, and how he was placing so much focus on her physical appearance over her mental recovery, the friend said: "Maybe there's something he doesn't want you to remember."When Brooke repeated this to her so-called "boyfriend," telling him she found it funny, he was not at all amused. "He freaked out," she recalled, and raged at her saying: Why would you say that to her? Why would you say that, that I don't care about your mind getting better?"It was only when Brooke's best friend returned from her overseas study trip and saw the man who claimed to be the "boyfriend" that the full picture began to emerge. Brooke realised why his face had seemed naggingly familiar to her – he had been hanging around her college campus and sexually assaulted her friend a year before.."This whole time, I knew something was off," she said, but it was only when her friend reminded her that things began to click into place.It turned out that there really had been something he didn't want Brooke to remember. She continued: ""I confronted him and said, 'Hey, I remember this. This happened. I know this happened."'I remember this happened. Is that why you're here? Is that why you have stuck around?'"After this argument, the man said he was going to split up with Brooke, which absolutely delighted her mum, who had never liked him. Her mum continued: "She said, 'Yeah... he did also try to pull the plug on you.'"I said, 'What?' And she said 'When you were in a coma, he came to me and said, if things aren't looking good, we should not be afraid to pull the plug on her.'"This, Brooke says, had been two days in to her coma.Even after she told the "boyfriend" she never wanted to see him again, every now and then Brooke would receive a call or an email from him. "It was always the same thing," she says. He wanted to know if Brooke's friend was planning to press charges after he had assaulted her.His exact motive for faking his "relationship" with Brooke remains unclear.
