Comatose and near death, Melissa lay in Frankford Hospital- Torresdale Campus for weeks after the January 2003 accident. One doctor attributed her recovery to the "plasticity" of her youthful brain; she was27 at the time. A roadside memorial marks the spot along Route 413 where the drunk driver hit their car.
- Seeking Jasta
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Seeking Jasta
A stunning tragedy took her daughter and her memory. Each day, she fights to get another bit of them back.
"We talked about it a couple times," said Melissa's brother John. "I said to my mother, 'You have to let her go, because she doesn't want to be a vegetable.' "
After that threat passed, doctors feared she'd be paralyzed from the chest down. But she began moving her legs and toes.
Melissa suffered collapsed lungs, a neck fracture, broken ribs, and a broken leg, but the primary concern was her traumatic brain injury.
Jasta's brain was shaken so hard it killed her. Melissa's nearly so.
After nearly a month in a coma, Melissa regained consciousness. Even before Melissa could speak, still on a respirator, her mother told her about Jasta, that she had died in the crash. Daubenspeck saw tears well in her daughter's eyes.
But what Melissa understood is uncertain. That she didn't remember would become obvious. When she did speak, she told her family she was pregnant, in the hospital to have a baby. She didn't remember she'd already had Jasta.
She also didn't recognize Dan Jones, her boyfriend.
But once she remembered him, she immediately recited his cell-phone number. There was nothing predictable about what she could remember and what she couldn't.
Melissa had forgotten how to feed herself, how to bathe, how to walk, how to control her bladder. She was a child all over again.
Then she would forget
She moved to Magee Rehabilitation Hospital, and as her brain began to heal, Melissa would ask about Jasta. Again and again, her mother would tell her Jasta was dead.Melissa would cry uncontrollably, devastated.
And then she would forget.
Hours later, or the next morning, she'd ask her mother again, "Where's Jasta?"
"I used to have to tell her 20 times a day that her daughter died," Daubenspeck recalled recently. "And she couldn't remember that. I told her over and over. But then, like, later the same day, she'd say, 'Where is Jasta?' and you'd have to go though the whole story again. There was this fantastic nurse at Magee who would crawl into bed with her because she'd cry herself to sleep."
"It was all new to her each time. I would come home and I was like a zombie, exhausted."
The records from Magee are filled with entries like the following, from therapist Todd M. Lewis: "Melissa continues to have significant memory deficits and thus has episodes where she forgets her daughter has died. She will then recall this and become emotionally overwhelmed."
After six weeks at Magee, Melissa went to live with her aunt, who worked nights and could watch her during the day, when other family members were working.
Although she had been told countless times that Jasta was dead, Melissa fully expected Jasta to run into her arms when she walked through her aunt's front door.
No Jasta.
"I thought they were so cruel, playing a horrible joke on me," recalled Melissa. That day she remembers.
