Hi! My name is Rachel Burdick and I am currently a master's student at UC Berkeley in Environmental Engineering. My AVM story dates back to 2016 in the last month of 6th grade before summer. I’d gone to school and gymnastics practice as normal that day and from what I remember nothing had gone out of the ordinary. However, at gymnastics as the hours and minutes ticked by my head started to throb more and more and it felt like my vision was blurring. I asked to lay down and as time went by my headache got worse till I started vomiting and could barely move. I tried to text my mom but I could barely see the keyboard as my vision was severely blurred. My coach started to worry and brought other coaches to check on me to see if this was “normal”. When I started to roll on the floor from the pain, my coach called my mom telling her to come ASAP as my condition was serious. My mom rushed to the gym and tried to get me into the car. My left side was limp and weakened so my coach had to support my weight on the way to the car. After getting to the car, my mom had asked me how bad the pain was and I kept telling her ABOVE TEN, ABOVE TEN as my head felt like it was exploding. Upon hearing this, my mom called the ambulance who arrived shortly after. On the way to the hospital, I kept fainting from the intracranial pressure inside my head and the EMTs had to keep waking me up as they didn’t know what condition I was having. After arriving at the hospital, I was rushed to the ER where the head neurosurgeon took a CT scan and saw that the source of my pain was coming from an AVM that had hemorrhaged and told my parents I needed immediate surgery to put in a drainage tube for the blood that had collected in my central ventricle. It was a slow recovery process, after 5 days I was gradually lifted from my sedation and moved to a regular room where I did PT and got my muscles working again. In July of the same year, I had neurosurgery to remove the AVM; however, after an angiogram, two months later, they found a tendril of the AVM that had branched off into an area close to my corpus callosum. So in October of 2016, I had gamma knife radiation to shut down the leftover tendril and once and for all be AVM free. For the next 3 years, I was monitored and none of the follow-up MRIs and final angiogram showed any signs of an AVM meaning it was gone. The only residual effects that I have from the AVM is 30% loss of my left peripheral vision which hasn’t affected my daily life much as I’ve learned to adjust by turning my head more or compensating with other aspects of my vision and it hasn’t stopped me from playing sports, school activities, or normal teenage milestones like getting my license and going independently to my activities. From my time in the hospital, I learned how much my friends and family cared for me as during that time friends donated meals to my families, drove my siblings to their activities, or came to visit me in the hospital and I felt the appreciation and love of the ones I hold closest to my heart. While my AVM was a traumatic event, it helped me meet new friends who had been through the same situation as me through this organization and to value the relationships of my friends and family I had around me. 

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