After three years of “surviving the toughest battles” together, a bride in Canada is enjoying her first dance with her husband and going down the aisle at her wedding. The couple has been together from the beginning of their relationship.
TikTok actress Brianna Seewald, 30, told PEOPLE in an exclusive interview that she was injured in a vehicle accident in August of 2020, which left her mostly paralyzed from the neck down. She shattered her neck and had other injuries as a result of the event. And as she informed her fans on TikTok, she was still dedicated to going down the aisle with fiancé Ryan Borkowsky years later despite the hurdles she experienced. This was despite the fact that they had been engaged for a number of years.
Now, as she has revealed on social media, she has done exactly that, and she even experienced a romantic first dance with her now-husband after completing her promise to both him and herself last month at their September wedding. She made this promise in September, when they were engaged, and she fulfilled it last month during their wedding in September.
“In order to be able to walk down the aisle at my wedding, I committed myself to working out every single day for over three years. And by that, I do mean each and every day. According to what Seewald shared with People, “I had three hours of intensive physical therapy, and it was just too much for my body to handle.”
“The day had finally arrived. During the few months leading up to the wedding, my mother and father had been coaching me along with our rehearsals. They came to the facility where I get my physical therapy, and there, my physical therapist instructed them on how to properly hold me while providing support with my leg braces. We ran through many scenarios to sort out the kinks in the logistics,” she says.
She continues by saying, “Ryan was never able to see any of it. I never once let Ryan observe us when we were practicing. Nobody else did except for my mother and my father. I wanted everything to come as a complete shock to them if it was at all possible.
Seewald has spoken up about her experience after the automobile accident in 2020, which resulted in her being taken to the hospital after her vehicle collided with another vehicle that was crossing a highway in Manitoba. Since her tragedy, Seewald has garnered a following on social media, where she has discussed her recovery from the event.
She revealed this information in a recent TikTok video, saying that her future husband, Borkowsky, proposed to her while she was in the hospital bed, and at the time, she told him she would do whatever it takes to walk down the aisle.
“In the aftermath of the collision, I let Ryan off the hook. When they informed me that I had fractured my neck, I immediately understood the extent of my injuries. And at that point, I realized, this is it. “I have four levels of paralysis,” she explains. I told him that I didn’t want him to remain out of pity or because he was afraid of what other people would say of him. We were still relatively young, and I didn’t want him to spend his whole life tending to me and sleeping next to me in a hospital bed.
“But he gave me the craziest look and he never missed a day after that,” according to her.
The month before, on the day of their wedding, Seewald rolled down the sixty-foot-long aisle in her wheelchair for around forty feet. Her parents approached her with her leg braces when she had around 20 feet left to go. Seewald climbed to his feet after putting them on.
“By the time I made it down the aisle, Ryan was already sniffling and wiping his eyes. “But when I finally looked up and when he saw that I was standing and that I really was going to walk in, he just became so emotional,” she adds. “When he saw that I was standing and that I really was going to walk in.”
“It was just such a full circle moment for all of my friends, my family, from Ryan and I, everyone who had supported us up until that point got to watch those moments happen,” she says further.
Seewald, who has gained over 530,000 followers on TikTok as a result of her motivational story and hilarious attitude to social media, posted her first video after the wedding on the site, in which she gushed about how “sunny and perfect” her wedding day was. She began to speak through her tears, “Everything was so beautiful.”
“And I did it, I got to walk to Ryan on my wedding day with my mom and my dad,” according to her. “And I absolutely cannot wait to play the wedding video for all of you. After three years of really difficult labor, Ryan finally asked me to be his wife, and I told him that I would walk down the aisle to him on our wedding day. And I was successful. And I got to do it in front of all of my friends and family and everyone else who has loved and supported me along the way.
In a another post on Instagram, she referred to the event as “more than just a wedding,” describing it instead as a “promise I kept to Ryan.”
“It was 3 years of incredibly hard and at times excruciating work, it was surviving the toughest battles physically and mentally to be here,” according to Seewald. It was the thought that I would never have this day or be able to appreciate it, and the realization that I was completely wrong about both of those things. This day was my own personal fairytale, and I got my happily ever after at the end.
According to what she wrote, she and Borkowsky were married after being in a relationship for eight years, with the final three being the few years in which they “had to endure and overcome.”
“The last 3 years showed us we have a relationship that can handle the toughest storms,” according to her. “With Ryan by my side we are unstoppable.”
