Coeur d’Alene Charter graduate plans to help others as a doctor

Jodi Grantham plans to become a doctor. She has spent half her life watching the good they can do.

Grantham’s father, Dick Grantham, died in 2013 after he was diagnosed with liver cancer when Jodi was in fourth grade. His survival in those intervening years was thanks to a liver transplant and medications, she said.

“I saw the medical advances and how they’re helping,” Grantham said. “He wouldn’t have lived that long if there wasn’t such a thing as liver transplants.”

Grantham, 18, one of two salutatorians at Coeur d’Alene Charter Academy, plans to attend Seattle Pacific University in the fall as a premed student, majoring in biology. She’s leaning toward a career in general practice so she can help a variety of people.

She’s one of four sisters: three, including Jodi, adopted by Dick and Sharlene Grantham from China, and one adopted from the Philippines. She doesn’t remember her own adoption at age 2, but she does remember traveling back to China at 3, when her parents adopted her older sister. (Jodi got lost on the Great Wall of China, she said, “which is very bad. My mom had a panic attack. I have a better sense of direction now.”)

It wasn’t just doctors who helped Grantham’s family throughout her father’s illness. Family and friends cared for the girls in Dalton Gardens while their parents traveled for out-of-state treatment and their mother cared for their father. Toward the end of Dick Grantham’s life, hospice workers visited two or three times a day.

But she’s intrigued by science, especially human biology, as well as the idea of helping patients.

Grantham likes “concrete learning,” she said, but also the room for creativity in labs, where students might be tasked with finding their own path to an answer, “which is important, because that’s how life is.”

At school, she’s soft-spoken and caring, a hard worker who “does not need anyone’s praises for her efforts,” Bev Chambers, a counselor at the school, wrote in an email: “She leads quietly, completely by example.”

Her parents always have emphasized the importance of education, she said. She values learning, even in informal settings. At school, she also plays mixed-doubles tennis and holds down leadership roles in school organizations.

But at Charter, she said, “I can focus on my academics. I’m a nerd – I claim it.”