She’s got it made, right? Only 28, attractive and outgoing, a Princeton grad and with her own business that takes her throughout the country and to Canada and Mexico as a guest speaker. A good day job at a nonprofit organization with a social conscience. An apartment in Manhattan’s theater district.
Get this: What’s her business? She’s a motivational speaker who talks about overcoming adversity. What could someone like her know about adversity?
Plenty.
"When I speak, I often don’t describe what happened to me right away," says Jessica Melore, who grew up in Branchburg. "I just let it come out and you can see the reaction on the faces of the people in the audience."
When she was 16, a top student and actor and singer and dancer in school and co-captain of the Somerville High tennis team, Melore collapsed with a massive heart attack while attending a relative’s birthday party. Her heart was damaged beyond repair and she almost died. When she awoke after emergency surgery, she discovered her left leg had to be amputated above the knee.
For nearly a year, while she waited for a transplant, she lived with what amounted to an artificial, battery-operated heart in a backpack. After the transplant, her immune system suppressed, she contracted cancer, Burkitt’s lymphoma. Twice. Once while at Princeton and again just two years ago.
"After I describe what happened to me, they realize I know a little bit about adversity," she says.
Melore is senior program manager for The New Jersey Organ and Tissue Sharing Network, an organization in New Providence that helps to procure organs and tissues for the more than 4,000 state residents needing transplants. Through a foundation, it raises money to help families of both donors and recipients and promotes organ donation.
She is the group’s liaison with New Jersey’s Motor Vehicle Commission, which facilitates organ donation through donor sign-ups that appear on driver’s license applications. Melore also helped conduct a study aimed at getting businesses to encourage employees to become organ donors.
Her private business — accessible through www.jessicamelore.com — gets her speaking engagements with a variety of organizations, from trade groups to charities and private businesses. She also is a spokeswoman for the American Heart Association and the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.
"Not exactly what I had in mind growing up," says Melore, who had hoped to become a television journalist.
While Melore is, by nature and, now, by profession, upbeat and optimistic, part of her is always aware of how close to dying she was and how fragile life is.
"I think I survived by wanting to reclaim my life, or as much of it as I could," she says.
Even before her transplant, she sang and danced in the high school play. She would insist her parents drop her off at parties on the way home from chemotherapy sessions. She climbed the Parthenon, went zip-lining over the tree canopy in Costa Rica, and learned to ride a horse.
"You worry but then you have to make a decision to be happy, to live your life no matter what," she says.
Part of that, she says, is the sense she is living for two people — herself and the young woman whose death in a car crash provided her with the heart she now has. The woman, Shannon Eckert of Mechanicsburg, Pa., just 18 when she died, was an avid equestrienne.
"I just learned she had signed an organ donor form when she got her driver’s license," she says. "That was strange considering what I do for a living."
On Wednesday in Philadelphia, Melore will meet Shannon’s mother Tammy for the first time and both will complete a portrait of Shannon made from flowers that will adorn a float in the Parade of Roses in Pasadena Jan. 1. Eckert, who declined to be interviewed for this story, and Melore will ride on the float, sponsored by a national organ donor network.
"Shannon’s death gave me life — I don’t have the words to show how grateful I am. So I want to live my life that’s also a tribute to her," says Jessica Melore.
0 COMMENTS:
Post a Comment