Woman survives seven-storey fall after trying to retrieve dropped phone from Melbourne balcony

Tominey Reid shouldn't be alive to tell her story.

Almost exactly a year ago, the 21-year-old apprentice hairdresser plunged seven storeys from her boyfriend's balcony while trying to retrieve her dropped phone, falling face-first through a pane of glass.

Reid tore an artery in her heart, broke her back, shattered a kneecap, severed her sciatic nerve and spent five days in an induced coma.

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"I was hanging from the balcony for about five minutes," Reid told A Current Affair during her first television interview since the fall.

"I had fake nails on and they were snapping off one by one."

Reid was on her then-boyfriend Kyle's seventh-floor balcony in Melbourne.

She was video-calling him while Kyle was holidaying in Greece.

"All of a sudden the phone fell backward off the balcony," Kyle said.

"I decided to hang up and I was like, 'Oh, she'll go get her phone'."

But that call never came and Reid was rushed to hospital, clinging to life.

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She had knocked on the door of the balcony below, where her phone had fallen, but there was no answer.

So Reid decided to take action and attempted to reach the phone herself.

"I tried to retrieve it and I was hanging over the balcony," she said.

"I made the conscious decision to let go because I was getting too weak to hold on anymore."

Reid said doctors told her she would probably have permanent brain damage and her leg would have to be amputated, but she was determined to prove them wrong.

"I thought, 'stuff that'," Reid said.

"I think it's a good message for young people to know that they're not invincible."

"Have more thought in decisions you make because this has impacted my life forever.

"And phones are replaceable."