A British man’s family has issued a desperate plea for funds after he suffered a freak fall while using gym equipment in Turkey, leaving him fighting for his life.
Marlon McCormack, 51, suffered a bleed on the brain and is currently in an induced coma while his family seek donations through GoFundMe to help urgently raise funds to pay his medical bills in the hospital in Turkey.
His daughter, Renelle McCormack, 27, was taking family pictures with her younger sister, her father and his girlfriend just the night before and woke up to the terrible news last Thursday that her dad was having a stroke.
Since then, he had to undergo surgery ‘as 50 per cent of his brain is bleeding’, according to his daughter Renelle, and he now needs a second operation.
She told MailOnline: ‘He went to sleep and hasn’t woken up since. Our whole lives were just turned upside down overnight.’
The family has been asked to fork out £24,000 for the first surgery and £1,500 for every day Marlon has to stay in the ICU as they do not have travel insurance – and with the father-of-two now needing another surgery, the hospital bills are racking up.
Marlon McCormack, 51, suffered a bleed on the brain and is currently in an induced coma. He is pictured the night before he fell ill with his daughter Renelle (right) and her 16-year-old sister (left)
Marlon (left) said he fell while at the gym on holiday in Turkey, before losing feeling in his body
‘He’s been in a coma for seven days and he needs another brain surgery in a week, followed by four weeks of recovery in the ICU which is going to be around £80,000 in total,’ Renelle said.
She added that the family was looking into medical repatriation, whether it be by plane or by boat, to get Marlon back to the UK – which could set them back another £40,000.
Despite having already raised nearly £23,000, this only covers the first surgery and not any of Marlon’s hospital stay, let alone the second surgery and the repatriation.
Renelle said: ‘Now we’re back to square one again [with the fundraiser], because we’re already gonna have to pay the hospital £19,000 for his first brain surgery.
‘I’ve heard that [the hospital] is not just gonna let him die if we can’t afford it, but I don’t know if they are going to want half upfront – but we need to raise the funds.
‘Regardless of whether it’s the funds for him to fly home or the funds for the operation, we are going to have to come up with some funds, because the medical repatriation company won’t fly without cash upfront.’
Aside from the financial worries weighing on the family, Renelle said she was also thinking about what could happen if her father dies.
‘My 16-year-old sister’s mum already passed away. My dad is all she has so if he dies, my sister would be an orphan. She’s got nobody, all she’ll have left is me. So that would leave me in a position where I would be her carer. It’s a lot,’ Renelle said.
Anna Ryan (R) said she had raised the initial £3,000 payment for Marlon’s (CR) treatment – but the family are now crowdfunding for support with the hospital asking for tens of thousands
She added: ‘My dad’s girlfriend is now in Turkey, alone, in a foreign country, and her boyfriend is asleep. So even though she’s with him, she’s alone.’
Marlon’s girlfriend, Anna Ryan, 41, was with the 51-year-old on the day he was rushed to hospital.
‘Marlon got up early to go to the gym,’ she told BirminghamLive a day after the freak accident. ‘He came back and said he’d fallen while he was there.
‘He went back to sleep and when he woke up he couldn’t stand – it looked like he’d had a stroke. We called an ambulance and he was rushed to hospital.’
The forklift operator from Chelmsley Wood had planned a ‘last-minute’ getaway with his family, leaving for Turkey on April 24.
Anna said she slept in the next morning as Marlon got up early to go to the gym.
Renelle McCormack, 27, was taking family pictures with her younger sister, her father and his girlfriend just the night before
When Marlon returned and was rushed to hospital, Anna was told her fiancé’s treatment would go ahead without the payment – but that the money would need to be found.
‘Due to the language barrier we believed it was a success, however they were unable to remove all the mass on his brain from the brain bleed and he remains in a critical condition,’ the organiser of the GoFundMe, Cherry Ryan, wrote on April 25.
She said that Marlon had been placed in an induced coma in intensive care while the family remained ‘at his side’.
She said the cost of the surgery would be £24,000 plus £1,500 a day in care for four weeks of recovery.
They previously said the hospital had demanded £25,000 up front for the treatment.
Anna said: ‘I’m being asked to pay loads of money I don’t have. They want £24,000 for surgery and then it’s four weeks of recovery which we’d need to fund too. We don’t have that kind of money – I don’t know what to do.
‘Something like this has never happened to me. We need as much help as we can get.’