The Ridge Alumni Memorial Scholarship selection committee has named RHS senior Molly Perdek recipient of the 2017 Ridge Alumni Memorial Scholarship, a $15,000 grant.

Following are excerpts from her application essay:

Once upon a time, Jennifer and Andrew Perdek welcomed their second child into this world, a 2-pound blue-eyed baby girl: a baby girl who spent the first year of her life not in the two-story colonial nestled behind a white picket fence as planned, but in a glass covered incubator, wrapped in endless wires.

As a rotating door of doctors attempted to label their pink cotton swaddled miracle, only one term would stick to their Google search bar: Hydrocephalus, meaning water on the brain.

…A year passed, and Molly received what her mom described as “her first haircut,” which consisted of a razor and the surgeon’s blade, but ended with a bow to cover the jagged scar.

…(At age 11, Molly began) 6 years of pain saturated hospital stays, and 18 more of those so called “surgeon’s haircuts.”

…During the time people are meant to figure out who they are and who they want to be, Molly, sometimes in tears as she imagined braiding her invisible hair, spent years as a spectator to the days that elapsed around her betadine drenched room.

…At Ridge High School I never really got a chance to be anything but “the Sick Girl,” making it difficult to be able to focus on my future. But as my senior year is underway and my college applications have been sent I am proud to say I am one year surgery free. My life was full of things I could not control. I didn’t get a choice in having 18 brain surgeries but I did get to choose to smile and bring a positive attitude to my life and those around me.