Melissa added, “I even nearly worked to death a few times. At twenty-two, I had an emergency appendectomy right in the middle of shooting a movie of the week in Portland Oregon. I felt so bad that I was affecting the schedule, I went back to work three days later. A few days after that I got sick with a horrible fever. I continued to film a few more days until I finished my work, flew home and was immediately hospitalized hallucinating from the fever. I was on the verge of sepsis.”
“These young professionals are children, and we should make sure they are allowed to be children. They should be allowed to say ‘no.’ Not push through physical or emotional pain. Not be made to support their entire families. And most certainly not to be followed everywhere they go by cameras, phones and prying, exploitive eyes,” she wrote.