Featured Story /// Shawn Cockrum, New Bloomfield HS


Shawn Cockrum was in St. Louis getting ready to address a gathering of about 100 teachers. He was Director of Student Sup- port Services with the Missouri Department of Education at the time, May 2014.


“I was getting ready to do a presentation and, like I always had to do, I went to use the bathroom before, “ Cockrum said. But there was blood in his urine, a lot of it. He went ahead and   Baptist Hospital immediately after, and they found a mass on one of his kidneys. He returned to Central Missouri and checked into University Hospital in Columbia for a battery of tests and discovered it was kidney cancer. 


 Christian for decades. 


     been in a panic. I never really lost hope at all.


80 /// November 2025 


 He was right. They caught the cancer in the early stages, but Cockrum still had to have the kidney removed, as well as his gall- bladder, and undergo chemo for eight months.   eight months, and lost 50 more pounds after to get down under 200. And his wife, Lorna, joined him on the quest, but “We never talked  on what we were eating. We just watched the amounts we were    He never lost his hope or sense of humor. Both helped him beat 


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