Money raised to transport UGA senior

After a University of Georgia student on spring break in Mexico suffered a serious medical emergency, a fundraiser to help transport her back to the United States raised more than $100,000 in less than 24 hours.

Friends of UGA senior Liza Burke started the GoFundMe page Sunday, two days after she fell ill. According to the page, the Asheville, North Carolina, native was on a trip to Cabo San Lucas with a group of friends when she complained of a headache at breakfast Friday morning. She went back to her room to rest, and when her friends later found her there, they couldn’t wake her, the GoFundMe said.

Burke’s friends called a doctor and she was rushed to the hospital, where she was diagnosed with an arteriovenous malformation (AVM) that caused her brain to hemorrhage, according to the fundraiser’s organizer, Jennifer Ritter. The hemorrhage left Burke unresponsive and she is now on life support, Ritter said.

According to the Mayo Clinic, brain AVM is a tangle of blood vessels connecting veins and arteries, and its causes are not clear. People are typically born with AVM, but it can form later in life and tends to afflict men more than women. AVM is often only discovered after a brain scan for a different health issue or after it causes a hemorrhage, the Mayo Clinic says.

In Burke’s case, Ritter told Channel 2 Action News that she was born with the condition “and nobody knew she had it.”

The funds raised on Burke’s behalf will help pay for her life-flight transport from Mexico to Jacksonville, Florida, Ritter said. The amount raised is more than triple the fundraiser’s original $40,000 goal.