I thought my boyfriend was an Uber driver & barely recognised my own daughter after car crash made me lose my memory

A MUM has been dubbed the real life '50 first dates' after a brain injury led her to forget her partner and barely recognise her own daughter.

, 33, suffered a brain injury when she was just nine after she was in a car crash in South Africa.

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As a result, she suffered from other concussions throughout her life, with the effects getting worse every time.

In 2022, Nesh, who lives in Toronto, Canada, had another bump on the head and when she woke up, suffered a bout of severe memory loss, even forgetting that she had a partner, Johannes Jakope, and six-year-old daughter.

“I reportedly was very confused and didn’t know what was going on,” Nesh explained to Newsweek.

“Then over the course of a couple of hours, I lost my memory. By that evening I didn’t know who my partner was. I didn’t know much about my daughter. That’s so difficult.”

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Nesh was taken to the hospital as she was in a constant state of panic about where she was and who she was with.

In fact, when she woke up, she thought her partner, now husband, was her Uber driver.

Her partner regularly filmed their interactions as evidence for her memory loss as some doctors failed to believe it was from a brain injury.

In one clip, she asked him, “Are you the Uber?” “I’m your boyfriend,” he responded.

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“Oh, no, my mom’s going to be so mad,” she says, adding that she “can’t have a boyfriend.”

During her three-day stay in the hospital, the five psychiatrists who assessed her confirmed the issue was not psychological and she was finally approved to see a neurologist.

“He said the thing that I think a lot of doctors are afraid to say which is, ‘I don’t know,'” she recalled to Newsweek. “It was nice to hear that because at least I wasn’t being gaslit.”

As a result, family members had to be with Nesh all the time - even while she showered - as she would forget what she was doing and where she was.

Nesh has since been in and out of hospitals and sharing her recovery on TikTok.

Despite forgetting much of her previous life, Nesh and Johannes are still together as he helps nurse her back to health and got married last year.

“It was a really difficult thing to get through,” she said to Caters, noting the strain her injuries have had on their relationship. 

“[Jakope] has been so patient with me throughout my entire recovery,” Pillay added.

“His constant love and support throughout this time have culminated in me falling in love with him again, and our engagement.”

The pair have now also welcomed their second child into the world.

During her memory loss, Nesh says while she didn't recognise her daughter as hers, her maternal instinct never left.

She said: "Whenever my memory would reset once a minute, I often found myself in a panic over the wellbeing of a child."

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"The fear for her wellbeing was often so intense I couldn't sleep at night."

Her journey on TikTok has filled people with hope, and now Nesh has her own documentary, 50k First Dates, coming out on Amazon Prime to show her full journey on February 11.