A 35-foot fall head first onto concrete pavement was not enough to stop Fred Jennings from running a marathon and earning his PhD.
By Sophie Betzhold
FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – On the first day of classes, students shuffle through the tight rows in the small auditorium that is Physics classroom 133. The old, metal seats squeak with every tiny movement made by the nearly 50 college kids waiting for instruction from their professor. Busy setting up his presentation, Fred Jennings has yet to acknowledge the dozens of eyes staring down at him. He sets two papers on the long desk in the front of the room and instructs the crowd to sign in for attendance.
Hundreds of creaks bounce between the white brick walls while the class settles back in yet again. This time, the professor welcomes them into the persuasion course and begins his introduction.
Like most instructors, he provides insight into his career and shares a glimpse into his life. A family portrait in a green field shows his family smiling at the room, and he details his time completing his bachelor’s degree at the University of Arkansas.
He talks about how he learned different ways to present information while finishing his master’s in communications in China. He clicks to move onto the next topic but pauses.
“I lost my train of thought,” he said. “This happens sometimes because of my fall.”
He takes a breath, pulls his mask back up between his nose and glasses, and continues teaching as if nothing happened. He finishes by explaining the class project that involves creating a fundraiser for nonprofits in the Fayetteville area.
Fred Jennings teaching his communications class. Photo by Sarah Wittenburg.
What Jennings left out of his opening remarks was the months he spent in and out of a coma in a hospital in Shanghai, the years of rehabilitation it took for him to learn how to walk and talk again, and his ongoing trouble with his vision. He did not share what it felt like when his skull hit the concrete below his apartment balcony.
Instead, he focuses on the impact he wants his students to make on the community while taking his class. His passion for creating positive change is apparent through his dedication to his students. Though the class may be unaware of the trials he persevered through to be standing in front of them, his passion and love for his work is evident.
Then 28, Jennings had been working in China for less than a year. April 15, 2009, while attempting to fix something on his girlfriend’s balcony, he tripped and fell 35 feet resulting in a coma that would last for three full days.
His girlfriend found his limp body beneath their home and took him to the nearest hospital. She informed his mother, Kathy Jennings, who was thousands of miles away in his hometown of Goodman, Missouri, with a call in the middle of the night.
“We didn’t understand her very well because she didn’t speak good English, but we heard ‘accident’ and ‘Freddie’ and ‘hospital,’” she said. “I asked her if he was okay, and she said yes, but he hasn’t woken up yet.”
His mother knew something was terribly wrong. She recalled not being able to sleep that night before the phone call and told her husband that “something was wrong with Freddie,” she said.
Because neither of his parents had passports, Jennings spent the next five days without his family until they acquired emergency passports from the governor and went straight to see their son. They were shocked by what the doctors told them.
The “doctor in Shanghai told us he just needed rest and gave him Tylenol Three,” she said. “We knew that there was something wrong because we knew how he was normally.”
He was a bright, young man who had been involved in many things. However, his slow responses were unusual for a normal recovery timeline, and his family was concerned.
Jennings was unconscious upon his parent’s arrival. When he awoke days later, he was in constant pain. They traveled to three separate hospitals all of which gave him the same diagnosis: he just needed time to rest.
“We even took him to an eye doctor because his eyeballs were just kinda floating around,” she said. “They told him to straighten up, like he was doing that on purpose.”
After a couple of weeks, Jennings was released from the hospital to heal in his one-bedroom apartment with his mother and father. He had yet to sit up in bed.
Jenning’s head was very sensitive to noise and light. The simple act of typing on a computer was enough to warrant an angry complaint, his sister Tiffany said.
After a gruesome 20-hour flight back home, he was taken to the local hospital where they discovered the plate that his brain sat on had cracked and was leaking spinal fluid. His head had been overcompensating for the loss of fluid and the excess liquid production needed to be stopped immediately.
He traveled 20 hours from Shanghai to Kansas City. He is welcomed by his family and friends. (Image courtesy of homeschoolhideout.com)
He was rushed to yet another hospital, this time, in St. Louis for an emergency surgery. There they found he had at least seven broken bones in his head, and after two months of no treatment, some had already healed improperly.
“Every doctor that he saw when we got back [to Missouri] has told us that he should not have made it with that much damage,” his mother said.
The following years consisted of intense rehabilitation at home and in various recovery centers.
“I couldn’t move without falling,” Jennings said.
While at a care center in Mt. Vernon, his mother received a phone call from a nurse who asked, “has he always been good at math,” she said. They had given him the hardest problems they could think of, and he solved them all without writing the questions down.
Jennings had always been good at math, but the nurse told her “When your brain gets affected it has files, and his math file did not get hurt at all,” she said with a chuckle.
He had always been insightful, but, at that time, he was unable to walk or speak many words. Yet, his students today do not notice the difference between his teaching versus any others.
“Without knowing beforehand that he’s had a head injury, I would have never known or assumed so,” said one of his students Ashlyn Falcon. “His teaching style doesn’t show any signs of past injury, and he teaches his class just like any other teacher would.”
Years after regaining most functions, Jennings had gone back to school to earn his PhD in communications at the University of Missouri. Though he has accomplished many things despite his injury, he still has ongoing complications from the fall.
For his vision, he took a three-hour round-trip car ride two or three times a week to therapy in Springfield. The Missouri Council of the Blind also performed home visits with the goal of getting him to focus, since he had little control of his eye movement.
Mind over matter was the focal point of his vision therapy. He would often stare at a ball on a string and try to get his eyes to move with it, a task that sounds easier said than done for a person with a traumatic brain injury.
Though his eyesight improved, “he still has tunnel vision, double vision, and no peripheral vision,” his mother said.
However, most of his physical rehabilitation was done at home.
In his childhood home, his mother taught him how to stand and walk, yet again, but this time, he needed a lot more help.
“We tied a belt around him” to let him work on balancing on his own, his mother said. He also performed various leg exercises to get his strength back because he couldn’t stand.
Jennings spent years in various rehabilitation centers in Missouri. He is now a Professor at the University of Arkansas. (Image courtesy of the Uark Directory)
“Every minute” was devoted to helping him recover, his mother said.
“[During rehab] I learned to set a goal and follow that goal,” he said. “Though it was tough, I had to make the decision to persevere.”
With extremely hard work and a lot of pain, both physical and mental, Jennings regained most of the normal bodily functions that he had lost. However, recovery will last “the rest of my life,” he said.
Nearly 10 years after the injury, he is a completely different person than he was before the setback. Though he had very little control in some aspects of his life after the accident, he made the choice to no longer live a “pointless, meaningless [life], that made no real impact on the world,” he said.
He had plenty of time to reflect and reevaluate the person he once was, and it led him to find a “new perspective” on life, he said.
He credits his family and community for helping him discover his newfound perseverance. His ability to recover was rooted from his network’s support.
His community, in fact, was the reason the Jennings were able to cover the enormous cost of his medical bills and his family was able to stay with him overseas.
“They gave us so much money,” his mother said. The football/soccer team he played on in China had “raised enough money where we never spent any at all over there,” she said.
Members of their local church also held an auction, dinner, and 5k, and their friends set up a bank account where they donated money to the family to spend during their time overseas.
The multitude of connections he had played such a large role in allowing Jennings to receive the help he needed. Today, he gives back to a newfound social group of those like him.
Jennings, once unable to stand on his own, had regained his love for running in the years since his accident. He was part of the Columbus House Brewery Run Club in Fayetteville, Arkansas, when he first met his friend Mary Dean.
The two spent the last night before COVID-19 shut down the country talking and running 5 miles together on the U of A campus. Dean had been an occupational therapist and was intrigued when Jennings shared the story of his recovery on their trek and how he started a couch-to-5k challenge that led him to run a full marathon.
“I was inspired hearing his story,” she said. She was shocked by his fearlessness when she heard of his visual impairments because “he would bolt across the street without looking,” she said with a laugh.
Dean had recently started an Achilles International chapter in Arkansas where she serves as president and founder. The non-profit is a global organization with the mission to “change the lives of people with disabilities through athletics and social connections,” she said.
Jennings joined the Achilles Arkansas group in 2020. He provides encouragement to all members each time they meet. (Image courtesy of @achillearkansas Instagram page)
The group meets every possible Saturday morning to run, walk, and roll together as a community. Noting how dedicated Jennings was to accomplish his goals, Dean invited him to the organization.
“In the last half-mile of the run, I decided to join the group,” Jennings said. “I am half volunteer, half athlete.”
Though Jennings meets with the group to run each Saturday, he also serves as a model for what the organization is about. Along with running a marathon, Jennings went back to school to earn his PhD after his fall. He learned the importance “to have a goal and follow that goal,” he said.
Dean uses him as an example to the other athletes to show that “no goal is too big,” she said. “Freddie was the first person I met [in Arkansas] that realized his disability isn’t a bad thing. In fact, he is thankful to be a different person.”
Since joining in 2020, Jennings has given speeches to the group and used his classes to aid the organization. He partnered with the nonprofit the following two years by making his students organize a fundraiser as a class project. Achilles collected all proceeds.
Though Jennings had taught before his fall, he encourages his students now to do meaningful work in their lives rather than “moving to do something fun” as he used to, he said.
Today, he inspires students to help their own communities by continuing to require some form of fundraising or event to help a local non-profit as an assignment. Using his work to make a difference is exactly why he got into teaching.
Many of his students enjoy “the idea of implementing nonprofits into our classwork,” said Falcon. “It’s a wonderful way of teaching that also gives back to our community.”
Though his students may be unaware of the full extent of his injury and years of recovery, Jennings’ passion for life and helping others is apparent in his work.
“He is a living example of overcoming adversity and is not ashamed of his disability,” Dean said. “He shows others how to embrace their strengths and weaknesses alike.”