Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 27, 1993 TAG: 9306270115
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CAROLYN CLICK STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Fifteen-year-old Melody Caldwell wanted to be a scientist, but that dream ended in a collision of tangled steel nearly five years ago.
She was riding on the console of the car because there were five of them, five teen-agers spending an ordinary October evening together.
Who knows now how the decision was made, why it was she who scrambled up on the console and not one of the others?
Did they discuss, as adults would, who should sit where, or like most teens, simply tumble in and grab a spot? Was she the smallest, the most compact? Or did she simply like the view?
She would not have known - because, of course, it is impossible to know such things - that the decision would be one of the last she would make as a carefree kid with nothing but possibilities ahead of her.
They were headed home when a tire blew and the driver lost control and spun wildly into a telephone pole.
In the chaos that was the mangled car and the sheared off pole, Melody lay with the steel gear shift, its rubber knob missing, shoved through her brain.
The others, as her mother remembers it now, suffered cuts and bruises but no serious injuries. They ran from the car because they feared it would catch on fire, and someone pulled Melody off the gear shift and to safety.
A passerby put Melody in her car and rushed her to Community Hospital. "My head hurts so bad," she moaned. The Rev. Charles T. Green was on call as chaplain at Roanoke Memorial Hospital that night. He got word of the accident as the young girl was being transferred from Community to the trauma team at RMH. The prognosis for survival was not good.
"In passing the message on from Community to RMH, they said they doubted if she would live until she got to Roanoke Memorial," Green recalled. He prepared himself to break the bad news to a family in terrible shock.
Melody, whose biggest concern only hours earlier was beating her mom's midnight curfew, hung on.
Her head was patched back together in a series of surgeries. One doctor, apparently despairing over the loss of all of her right brain and 30 percent of her left, suggested it would be kinder to turn off the life support system and allow her to die.
Melody's mother, Sherry Smith, recalls little of those days and hours after the accident. But she remembers that conversation and how she ran screaming from the room.
She would have nothing to do with giving up, even though she knew the Melody she had raised for 15 years, the energetic daughter who dyed her hair blonde and mugged impishly in family photographs, was gone forever.
Thus began a bedside vigil that expanded the boundaries of a family's love.
It is five years later, 11 o'clock on a late spring afternoon, and Sherry Smith is back where her nightmare began, back in Roanoke Memorial Hospital.
Only this time, there are bits and pieces of good news, the kind of tidbits that Sherry Smith has thrived on tenaciously since the dreadful accident.
Smith is a spare, no-nonsense woman, who wears the nervous edginess of a veteran smoker. If you look deep into her eyes, there is also the faintest trace of bone-weary exhaustion, although outwardly she rarely betrays anything but optimism and energy.
Melody has been hospitalized for several weeks with pneumonia, in the respiratory intensive care unit, but doctors see some progress and Smith is hopeful she will be able to take her daughter home soon.
Progress is what Smith lives for, what she has documented almost daily since those first weeks after the accident in October 1988 - tiny milestones registered within the covers of a thick, cloth-covered photograph album.
Here is Melody after her accident, her head swathed in bandages. Here is Melody at Cumberland Hospital for Children and Adolescents, a residential hospital where she underwent hour upon hour of therapy. Here is Melody, surrounded by balloons, headed home. Click. Click. Click.
Always, there was the hope that she would come home, even though Smith and her family had to learn new skills, how to suction a tracheotomy tube, how to feed her, how to turn her body so she would be free of bed sores.
This month there was yet another milestone. Melody, who once could not hold her head up, whose feet and hands were turned horribly inward, graduated from the Roanoke County Occupational School.
Because she was hospitalized, Melody was not there on June 11 to pick up the certificate of completion of her program.
Instead, her principal, Larry Shouse, came to her bedside in ICU, making an occasion of it, with family and friends, and the obligatory round of photographs for Melody's album.
Melody can neither talk nor walk, and her family readily admits they do not know how much she grasps of the world she now lives in. But that day, she held out her hand - "straight out," her mother says proudly - in greeting to her principal.
Shouse said Melody has made steady, definable improvement at the school, which is set to be closed because of new regulations that require handicapped children to be taught in their home schools.
"She did make a lot of progress after she came to us," Shouse said. "She was quite limited in her ability to grasp things and hold her head up when she first came to us, but she was doing very well with that before she got ill."
It is progress that can, at best, be measured incrementally. "She is not like a normal child where you see progress made on an daily or even hourly basis," Shouse said, but it was enough to buoy the staff.
Her graduation is a kind of affirmation for Sherry Smith, 37, and her family, whose lives have been altered so dramatically since the accident as to be almost unrecognizable.
After the accident, Smith gave up her nursing assistant's job to care full time for her daughter.
Melody's grandfather, Thomas Leffel, a retired electronics worker who loves to cook, studied nutrition and the brain and came up with a formula that would strengthen his granddaughter.
Melody's grandmother, Ann Peters, goes almost daily to the family's home to tend to her grandchild's physical needs and provide a little relief for Sherry.
Amy, Melody's little sister, now 17, had to learn to perform daily tasks for her sister that would baffle other teen-agers. She has, in effect, become the big sister.
And Jerry, Sherry Smith's husband and Melody's stepfather, the man who has raised Melody and her younger sister Amy since they were tots, has been the family's financial stability. A carpet-installer with his own business, he would maintain a vigil by Melody's bedside on his off-hours.
When Melody was at Cumberland Hospital outside Richmond, he would spend the weekend with the family, driving down after work Friday night and getting up before dawn on Monday to make the four-hour drive back to the Roanoke Valley.
There are others, family and friends, who contribute to the constant care that is vital to Melody's survival.
"Each one has a thing that they do," said Green, who has since retired as hospital chaplain. "I think it has brought them closer to each other."
Green, who has become almost a part of the family since the accident, marvels at the family's strength. He has ministered to many families with illness, but never one quite like this.
"They are willing to sacrifice their time . . . just to have their child alive," he said. "They have just as much enthusiasm as they had four and five years ago. I don't see how in the world they hold up."
Dr. Stephen Morgan, one of Melody's family doctors, has seen families struggle mightily when a member is struck by a swift and sudden disability. Too often, the burden of providing daily physical care - bathing, bathroom duties, linen changes - becomes too much, and "after a year or so, they just give up."
Morgan said he has never seen even a hint of surrender on the part of Melody's family.
What impact that attitude has on Melody's progress is hard to document medically, Morgan said. But he said, "I think if they had been complacent and not done anything, she would not have progressed this far."
Smith has never wavered in her belief that she made the right decision that night five years ago. There have been those who have asked, kindly enough, if she ever regrets the path she chose, for herself as well as Melody. She does not.
"Maybe I'm being selfish, but I'm glad she is alive," Smith said.
Melody's grandfather echoes that sentiment. He is strongly religious and believes that God, in His own way, prepared the family to care for Melody, who turns 20 next month. Smith had her nurses' training, he says, and Leffel himself had completed some courses in mental health and was a voracious reader on the workings of the human mind.
It is a powerful enough explanation in a capricious world, a world that can be at times so unbearably cruel that a 15-year-old girl can go out one night and lose, in an instant, the life she had known.
And it is apparently enough to sustain an ordinary family that believes that love cannot be separated from sacrifice and duty.
There is much that remains a mystery about the human brain, and so there is no way to gauge if the Melody that returned home months after the accident is as "happy" as the teen-ager who left that night.
No way to know if an occasional fleeting remembrance - a ghostly memory - tugs at her consciousness.
Morgan believes, although again there is really no way to document this medically, that Melody is "comprehending a heck of a lot more" than even he and her family believes.
He says this because she smiles, and expresses preferences for different people's company, and tightly grasps a visitor's hand in greeting.
But he does not believe that Melody will ever talk or walk again.
"I feel unfortunately she is locked inside her body," Morgan said. "She is probably at the peak of what she can do, with the exception of perfecting some motor skills."
Despite all he has read about the severely brain-injured, Melody's grandfather still hopes one day to hear his granddaughter speak and, maybe, to see her walk without assistance.
It is, perhaps, an unrealistic goal, a hope of a dreamer. Then again, no one remembering that awful night nearly five years ago would have thought Melody would be where she is today.
In her own way, Smith harbors hopes for her eldest daughter, although perhaps not the sort of aspirations she dreamed years ago.
She reserves only one for herself, a simple hope that she admits to a bit sheepishly, as if to articulate it would be to jinx its success.
It is this: "I just can't wait to hear her say, `Mom.' "
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