34-year-old Jessica Melore refuses to let her long medical history get the best of her.
When she was just 16 years old, she suffered from a severe heart attack and spent the next nine months – until she got a heart transplant – being supported by a battery-operated device to keep her heart pumping and her alive.
Although Melore’s life was saved after the transplant, subsequent complications forced her to have her left leg amputated.
During Melore’s second year at Princeton University, she was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, cancer that begins in the body’s lymphatic and immune systems. Melore conquered the disease – only to be diagnosed and treated for the disease again, just a few years later.
After she graduated from college, Melore decided to become a motivational speaker whose message was to spin tragedies in a positive light. Her most common line: “You can choose to live life in fear, or you can choose to live life.”
Melore was recently diagnosed with uterine cancer and will have to be treated with chemotherapy.
Rather than wait for her hair to fall out from treatment, Melore decided that she would cut her hair before treatment even began so she could donate 12 inches of it to Free Wigs for Kids, an organization that accepts hair donations to make into wigs for people under 21 who’ve lost hair due to cancer or other illnesses.
In spite of her long medical history, Melore doesn’t “feel like [she’s] cursed.” “I feel like I’m lucky,” she admitted, “because I’ve had a second, third, fourth, and now a fifth chance at life that so many people don’t get.”
When Melore went to get her hair donated, she invited the American Cancer Society to attend the event, so everyone could see the importance and value of paying it forward – regardless of where you’ve been and what you’re currently going through.
Melore always makes a point of aiming to inspire other cancer patients, "You have the potential to inspire a lot of other people by sharing your experience and bringing awareness to the need for funding and research so that one day, no one will ever have to face this.”
We’re wishing Melore a quick, full recovery.
