Four years ago, Shawna Fry had a nagging regret. She tried college after high school but was doomed by math and quickly withdrew. While she accepted a satisfying path as a wife and mother of two children, it bothered her that she didn’t have a college degree.
She began to consider going back.
“What happens if I do this, and I don’t make it again?” she asked herself, before finding her own answer. “I have two girls. If I am saying I can’t do it, so I won’t try, is that what I am saying to my kids? You aren’t going to be able to do it, so don’t try.”
So, Fry enrolled in online courses at Grand Canyon University in 2020 and for nearly four years studied late into the night until she was almost done with her last course.
But with one week in May left to completion, she suffered a stroke. Everything she had worked for, and maybe even a healthy life, seemed to disappear as doctors put Fry in a medically induced coma.
Hooked up to tubes that breathed and fed her in an Oregon hospital, the dream that began as a girl looked to be gone. She was adopted and grew up in a rough home, and her teachers were what got her through the rough spots, Fry said.
“Those teachers shared their love with me, and I didn’t know love,” she said. “That’s a lot of the reason I wanted to become a teacher. I wanted to make a difference in a kid’s life who maybe had rough spots, and they need love and need to know the love of Jesus and don’t have it anywhere.”
Fry wasn’t sure she could do it upon returning to college, with a fearful math class on her schedule. So she got a tutor. “I passed with an A. It was an amazing thing. I made it through the worst of what I quit when I was younger.”
Things only got better. She took her student teaching assignment at Crosspoint Christian School in Klamath Falls, Oregon, in a kindergarten classroom not unlike the one run by an idol teacher who she stayed in touch with all these years.
She quickly realized it was where God meant her to be, she said. One student’s mom was in prison and dad had died in his presence. He was scared and traumatized, but through the year, he started to thrive.
“All he needed was the belief he could do it,” she said. “I feel like God uses teachers in every student’s life to make a difference.”
What she had learned at GCU was “to meet each student where they are. Going through GCU, I’ve learned there are times you have to improvise and go beyond the curriculum because the curriculum is not enough.”
With just more than a week and one lingering assignment left to work on in May, she decided to do it the next day – a Sunday of Memorial Day weekend. But Saturday night she woke up to a numb arm. She got up and took over-the-counter medication and went back to sleep, only to wake up at 3 a.m. unable to move.
Husband Geoffrey Fry carried her to the car and drove to a hospital in Klamath Falls, where soon she couldn’t even swallow and was put in an induced coma. Doctors couldn’t find the cause for such a young woman of 36, and Fry said she was flighted to Bend, Oregon, where doctors diagnosed a medullary stroke.
After medical treatment and consciousness returned, “I thought I was dying. I kept thinking about my husband and my kids. I didn’t know what was happening. I can’t walk. I can’t feel anything.”
But Fry progressed rapidly soon after coming out of sedation and soon told her husband: “You have to call GCU.”
“I was really panicked. I had worked so hard, and so hard on my grade point average.”
He told her she had bigger worries.
Speech therapy, physical therapy and occupational therapy ensued in the following week, as Fry said therapists were stunned she could talk so well so quickly. “I talk so much,” she told them, “I don’t think the stroke can stop me.”
By the third week after the stroke, she was eating and talking normally, and had taken her first steps with a walker, which she still uses as her left side remains without feeling.
“The doctor said it was nothing short of a miracle,” she said. “That’s how good God is.”
She took the drive home to Klamath Falls by the end of June, still urging her husband to put her in touch with GCU again. But when she walked in the door, he had a surprise.
“Sitting on my counter was my diploma,” she said. “I started crying.”
Fry said she needed to say thank you to who was responsible. As it turns out, she was. Geoffrey had learned that extra hours of student teaching had made up for some of the missed days, and her grades were good enough that the last week of assignments only brought her grade down but not below the requirements to earn a bachelor’s degree in early childhood education.
“You did it!” shouted daughter Emalee, 7, while Kaylee, 9, beamed and husband Geoffrey snapped a photo.
“They will remember that. They will remember what that piece of paper means when they get older, and they get to see what a big deal it is to have that.”
She has a job as a first-grade teacher at Cross Point Christian and doctors say there isn’t any reason she can’t do it in August, as some functions will continue to improve through 90 days.
“This is the moment God had me here for, this purpose. That feeling you are making a difference.”
Grand Canyon University senior writer Mike Kilen can be reached at [email protected].
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