I know Jackie Cruz, 32, from Orange is The New Black. I watched it for a couple of seasons before it got too complicated for me. The seventh and final season has been shot and will come out on Netflix sometime this year. I’ve never read an interview with Jackie and this People profile of her moved me. Jackie moved out of her mother’s house at 16, got involved with a rough crowd and suffered a horrific car accident that same year that almost killed her. She was so depressed afterwards that she attempted suicide multiple times. It was a little girl in the hospital who helped Jackie recover, and her story about it choked me up. Here’s a link to a photo of her injuries. I didn’t embed it here as it’s hard to see.
One day, while on her way to a concert, her friend began racing a car next to them. After she lost control of the wheel, Cruz — who wasn’t wearing her seat belt — was ejected 20 feet from the windshield.
Cruz was immediately rushed to Los Robles Medical Center in Thousand Oaks, California, where they performed emergency brain surgery.
“They had to shave my head right away,” she says, while fighting back tears. “I had a kidney contusion, a collapsed lung, and two broken vertebrae. So my eyes were crooked and my face was crooked, I couldn’t smile.”
Cruz, who was not supposed to make it out of surgery alive, was in a 72-hour coma and woke up from sedation two weeks later.
“Looking at myself in the mirror, not like recognizing myself, was scary,” she says. “I wanted to commit suicide at the time because all I ever wanted was to be an actress and a singer and I grew up just watching beautiful people on TV and I just felt like that was it for me.”
Says Cruz, “It didn’t look like me anymore. I didn’t know who it was. I was very depressed and I tried to kill myself a few times with pills.”
But after a seven-month recovery, Cruz learned to love herself again with the help of a special friend.
“There was a little girl in the hospital. She was 10 years old, and her name is Melly,” she says. “She will never walk again, but she is strong and happy and she would come by my room all the time and I never really paid attention.”
“Then we got to talking, and she told me I was pretty. She taught me that beauty is always from within,” Cruz recalls. “It’s the way you treat someone, it’s the way you are, and she saw that. She saw the strength without, she saw the beauty in me without looking at my surface.”
This reminds me so much of Emilia Clarke’s essay about having two brain surgeries after suffering aneurysms. You never know what someone is going through or what they’ve dealt with in life. That story about the sweet ten-year-old in the hospital sounds a little like what Snopes calls glurge, except it comes across as true and believable. It’s like she went through the worst time of her life and realized that it could have been worse, that she had a lot going for her, and that she would be ok. She realized her dream of becoming an actress and was on a long-running Netflix series too.
Jackie is a singer, she has a new single out called Melly 16 that’s about her accident as a teen and is named after the little girl she met in the hospital. She’s still friends with her!! She links to Melly’s Instagram account in her post about the accident, and she has another post dedicated to Melly, that’s below. Reading that made me cry. The song is sweet pop, it’s as good as any hit I’ve heard I was impressed. Her latin pop song La Hora Loca is also so catchy.
Photos credit: WENN and via Instagram
I never got past a couple episodes of OITNB so I don’t know her but it’s good to hear a story with a happy ending like this. I’m also glad Melly is getting some time in the spotlight.
She looks so different on OITNB; although I haven’t watched it in awhile. I had to look up who her character was. What a beautiful story of perseverance – and Melly is gorgeous. I suffer severe depression and I always say we all need a Person. A Person who happens along and impacts you in some way so profound that you decide to live; both literally and figuratively. It’s not even always a huge gesture, just the right person at the right time and suddenly they’re your Person. Melly was her Person and it’s really nice Jackie shares her gratitude with the world. Total feel good story!
I’d like to think its a few “Person”s. You know? People change, and that Angel brings someone else at the right time?
@bchyyogi yes! Absolutely; different people have been my Person at certain times. They’re like real life angels for me.
I love the song! Also, it’s so cool that her OITNB costar is playing her mom in the music vid.
I don’t watch OITNB, but she looks like a cross between Patty Lupone and Kim Kardashian. Gorgeous skin.
Reading about Jackie and Melly made me cry. You never know what a kind word or gesture will mean to someone, it could–as here–mean the difference between life and death. Just as you never know how a careless, offhand comment or words said in anger will affect others.