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Melissa Walsh has learned of many of the details of her terrifying one-car crash one year ago this month, but she doesn’t remember much of it beyond slamming on her brakes after being cut off by another driver. Most of what the 19-year-old Oakland resident knows has been told to her. And from what her friends and family say, it’s amazing she survived at all.

That early-morning crash on Aug. 11, 2008, shattered her plans to start college classes in the coming weeks and, instead, sent her on a grueling road to recovery that would start out in a center in Atlanta that specializes in spinal cord rehabilitation. She would remain in Georgia for two months.

This is my every day, says Melissa Walsh, who was seriously injured in a car crash 1 year ago. She endures daily physical therapy to regain as much body and muscle function as she can.

The accident damaged her spinal cord, fractured her pelvis and broke her neck in three places, leaving Melissa — a former West Orange High cheerleader and rower — paralyzed from the shoulders down. Doctors prepared her parents, Sheri and Pete Loiacono, for the worst, saying she would likely be “ventilator-dependent” and “a complete quadriplegic.”

But neither Melissa nor her parents accepted that diagnosis. In just a year, this teen-ager with the two titanium rods, 16 screws and numerous pins in her neck has learned to feed herself, brush her teeth, put on her makeup, write her name (large but legible), send text messages on her cell phone and drive her electric wheelchair. Two weeks ago, she started flexing the wrist on her dominant right arm.

At another recent therapy session, when asked to move her legs, she put all her effort into it and her legs actually “started to tremor and pulse,” said her mother in an e-mail update she regularly sends out to friends and family.

The long road

In the months following her crash, Melissa admitted, she didn’t want to leave the house.

“I was embarrassed, ashamed — I had guilt for what I did,” she said.

It was later revealed that alcohol had been a factor in the 2:30 a.m. crash. In the car with her that night was her best friend, Lee-Anne DeVitis, who was also injured.

For the first eight months, Melissa said, “my goal was to keep my friends. I didn’t focus on therapy. I just didn’t want to lose my friends.”

But then the dreams started — dreams in which she says God spoke to her, shared Isaiah 40:31 with her (“But those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.”), told her to be thankful for all she has, said He would fully restore her but it would be a slow process.

So Melissa started getting serious about her therapy, and it has been a part of her everyday life for the last four months.

She stands for one hour in a standing frame for bone density.

“I get dizzy if I talk while standing, so it’s just an hour of thinking,” she said.

Then she puts in an hour and a half on the arm and leg bike. The electrodes that are hooked up to her help her muscles to involuntarily contract “to create a mindset of what my body used to do,” said Melissa.

Her mom added: “It’s to wake up, to fire the muscles to react. We’re trying to bring life back in.”

Melissa said her upper stomach muscles are “waking up and contracting.”

She also works out with weights strapped to her arms. And she started aquatherapy a few weeks ago to loosen the muscles in her back and increase her range of motion. She was excited that she could feel a burning sensation toward the top of her chest.

“That’s my everyday life,” she said matter-of-factly. “Therapy and hanging out with my home health aide.”

The bicycle Melissa spends so much time on is no ordinary bike. It and the electrical stimulus machine cost $25,000, and the family was able to purchase the equipment because of the generosity of so many people in the West Orange community. A giant yard sale was held a few weeks after the accident, which raised more than $4,000. About a month later, Melissa Fest, a Saturday music festival in downtown Winter Garden, brought in about $30,000.

“I never loved Winter Garden so much in my entire life,” Melissa said.

There were other fund-raisers too, including an event sponsored by the Adrenaline youth ministry that netted $12,000 and a recent wrestling benefit that raised another $2,000.

All this money has gone toward Melissa’s recovery and medical bills.

The family’s church, Mosaic Community Church, contributed $7,500 for Melissa and her mother to fly to Atlanta in an air ambulance just after the accident.

As she became more cognitive in the days and weeks following the accident, Melissa was able to speak in a whisper. Today, she is a vocal, spirited teen who wants to share her story with others about her mistakes, her recovery and her connection with God.

She went to the Winter Garden Rotary Club and the city of Ocoee, Mosaic church, Crenshaw School and an Adrenaline youth meeting — talking about her experience.

What’s ahead?

Melissa is planning to talk to the students at West Orange (where she graduated in 2008) and Olympia high schools in October. That is Homecoming month, a time when high-schoolers are more apt to attend parties and drink alcohol.

What will her message be? “A lot of parents tell you not to do something, and it goes in one ear and out the other,” Melissa said. “I hope they see me, 19, just graduated, about to go to college.…I’ll tell them, you should always have a designated driver. I’m not going to tell you not to drink, but be responsible with the choices you make. Call your parents to come pick you up, even if they get mad at you, because there can be bad outcomes to what you do.

“I just want to relate to them on a personal level,” she said. “Let them know I was where they are, sitting in the same seat.”

Melissa was able to take one course at Valencia Community College last semester: general psychology. She actually attended classes with her home health aide, who was only there for any physical needs Melissa might encounter. A fellow student took notes on carbon paper and shared a copy with Melissa. For tests, she had a scribe who dictated the answers for her.

Next week, she starts fall classes and has signed up for college algebra and freshman English 101.

Top-notch facility

Melissa has been given an opportunity to work with the country’s best doctors, as she was recently accepted into Johns Hopkins University’s Kennedy Kreiger Institute. This outpatient training facility “will allow us to learn from the best in the country what we will need to get Melissa to the next level,” Sheri Loiacono said.

The cost will run approximately $20,000, including the hotel stay, but Loiacono said the family’s health insurance will cover most of the expenses.

Melissa will attend the institute in Baltimore in early January.

Another testament to the family’s faith is the fact that without the RT300 bicycle and the stimulus machine — purchased with money donated from the community, Melissa would not have been accepted into the program. After completing two weeks of intense therapy and training at Johns Hopkins, this equipment is necessary for continuing her therapy at home.

A new life

Life goes on, and Melissa copes the best she can and hopes for further recovery. There are moments when the tears flow, but her faith brings her back up.

“People ask me how I’m dealing with it, and I say God. I’m not dealing with it; God is,” she said.

“I’ve always been a Christian and believed in God, but it was in the back of my head — call Him when you need Him. Now it’s 100 percent, all the way.”

When this reporter talked to Melissa, she could see the determination in her face and in her eyes.

“I’m not a quad, I’m not paralyzed,” she said with resolve. “I’m just Melissa in a wheelchair, Melissa with a disability.”

On the wrist that she works so hard to flex is a tattoo, a present for her 19th birthday in April. She has the word “hope” in scripted writing. Her friend, Lee-Anne, has “faith” on her wrist, and another close friend, Kristen Antony, got “love” tattooed on hers.

The Loiaconos say that life is good, that God is good, and that He will heal their daughter. They have hope, and they have faith.

In the beginning, Melissa was taking six or seven different types of medicines, her mother said, but she only takes one now, a preventative low-dose anti-seizure medication following two seizures earlier this summer.

An update on the family’s Caringbridge Web site last week shared their testimony, their trust in God and their certainty that Melissa will one day walk again.

Said Sheri Loiacono: “We’re praying our way through it.”

Lee-Anne’s recovery

Lee-Anne DeVitis was in the passenger seat when Melissa’s car left the road that night. She had a broken tailbone and fractured pelvis and spent the next two months in physical therapy at an office near Health Central in Ocoee.

One of the discs in her lower back is out of place and pushing against nerves, “so I still get pain in my lower back if I stand for too long or if I’m sitting on a hard surface,” she said.

She said she goes back to the doctor periodically for checkups.

Lee-Anne will start her second year at Valencia and is taking four classes, which she has done the last two semesters.

Has the accident affected her life? “Yes, it’s completely changed it. I don’t take any day for granted now. I’ve learned to love everything I have and the fact that I can wake up every morning.”

She added: “My friendship with Melissa has grown, and I could not have asked for a better best friend.”

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