
need my face back.
Donation protected
My name is Melissa Gorelick. I was born with a broken blood vessel in my head. My whole life I suffered from "clumsiness" and as a baby I always had a bruise on my head. Growing up, I always had the worst headaches. Screaming..crying..throwing up. My father was usually at work and my mother would be like "calm down, it's just a migraine." Till one day it got so bad that I said if you don't call 911, I am going to kill myself. So she did, and I went to the hospital and they found the "broken blood vessel". And what the headaches were were actually brain hemmorhages. So I was going to the hospital every so many months for a procedure that made me stay in the hospital for five to seven days, multiple times. I was twelve years old when the blood vessel was discovered. So from twelve years old on I was going to the hospital for a week every few months. Then when I was like I don't know maybe 16 I was rebellious and said enough is enough already, these doctors are taking way too long. So I stopped going for my treatments. Then at age 17, when I was finally out of my parents' house and living with my exboyfriend, I had another brain bleed, or a brain hemmorhage, that almost killed me. This time the bleed was so bad that it made one of my eyes cave in towards my nose so one eye was crooked so I saw double so I had to wear an ugly pirate looking eye patch over one eye. And I have an eye nystagmus in my good eye. That means that everything I look at bounces, or jumps. This is also why I cannot drive. So then my exboyfriend said I had to go with my parents because he could not take care of me. So I went to live with my father, who recently divorced my mother, in Pennsylvania. FYI I have ALWAYS had the worst relationship with my dad. He looked at me and treated me like I was the biggest, worthless piece of trash ever. So living there lasted for one month before I was so bored and miserable that I went to go live with my mother and her boyfriend in upstate, New York. I stayed there for a year before I called my aunt up (my dad's sister), crying, that I did not want to live. My father was now living with my aunt in her one bedroom apartment in Manhattan. So my aunt did what a good aunt would do and got me out of there. She brought me back to her one bedroom apartment, and gave me her bedroom while she slept in the living room on the couch opposite of another bed; that my father slept on. I lived there for about twelve years until I got my own reduced rent apartment since I can’t work and am on SSI. This is where I am currently living now, deaf from my brain procedure. I may or may not get my hearing back. The doctors are unsure. But I am stuck with half of a face because a nerve died in one side of my face drooping my lip down.
Organizer
Melissa Gorelick
Organizer
New York, NY