A stroke paralyzed her left side. Now ‘Pastor Trish,’ wife of Eagles reporter Derrick Gunn, is back at the altar: ‘My story’s not done’

Trish Gunn’s sermons are more conversation than lecture. The pastor talks to her congregation as if they’re old friends. She makes jokes; Gunn once compared the challenges of faith to a pair of leggings, stretched after gaining a few pounds.

She shares her greatest fears and struggles, like when her 1-year-old grandson, Elijah, was diagnosed with neuroblastoma, a cancer that primarily affects children. Elijah was intubated twice. Doctors had to put him into a medically induced coma. Miraculously, the baby survived, but it was a harrowing ordeal.

Gunn — better known as “Pastor Trish” — turned this into a sermon, which she delivered on Oct. 23, 2023, at New City Church in Wilmington. She wore a purple blouse and a purple sweater. Her dark brown, salon-styled curls sat on her shoulders as she moved around the altar. Every word was enunciated with poise and purpose.

Twelve days later, Gunn collapsed at her home in Bear, Del. She woke up in Christiana Hospital. She tried to move her body, but couldn’t. “I felt like I had weights on,” she said. The doctors pinched Gunn to see if she could feel any pain. She did in some places, but not in others.

The pastor was told that she’d had a stroke. The left side of her body was paralyzed. About a week after her accident, she was transferred to a rehabilitation center in Delaware, but while Gunn was there, she suffered an intracranial hemorrhage and had to be rushed back to Christiana. She shuffled between the two hospitals for six weeks.

Gunn couldn’t lift her left arm. She couldn’t walk. She struggled to talk and chew. But all she could think of was work. She worried about outlines of sermons that needed to be finished and projects that needed to be completed.

Almost every day, she’d ask her husband, longtime Eagles reporter and TV anchor Derrick Gunn, how New City Church was doing.

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“We had to constantly remind her, ‘You can’t worry about this right now,’” Derrick said. “‘You can’t.’”

This was not easy for Pastor Trish. She’s always been a giver. But to help others again, she had to learn to help herself. And over the last year and a half, that is what she’s done.

Derrick, 67, has become her full-time caregiver (and, as he likes to point out, her hair stylist, chauffeur, and secretary). He makes sure she takes nine pills in the morning and six pills at night. He drives her every day to a litany of appointments — speech therapy, pain specialists, chiropractors, neurologists.

So far, they’ve seen progress. Trish, 67, has more mobility in her arms, hips, and shoulders. She can project better than she used to, and can walk in small increments with a cane. Her memory is sharper, and the left side of her face has straightened.

Now, she is back at the altar. In January, Gunn returned to Trinity Community Church in Hockessin, Del., where she used to work as an executive pastor, alongside her role at New City. She talks to the congregation after the Saturday night service and holds one-on-one sessions during the week over the phone and in-person.

She sits in a wheelchair. Her salon-styled curls have been replaced with natural waves. Her voice is not as crisp and her delivery not as powerful. But while the pastor looks different and sounds different, her message is just as clear.

“I know that my story’s not done yet,” Trish said. “It’s going to be a story that somebody can say, ‘If God can do it for her, God can do it for me.’”

Trish and Derrick met in 1977 at California’s Imperial Valley College, near the Mexican border. They were 19 and in the same sociology class. Trish had heard that students were getting a pop quiz, so she decided to give Derrick a heads-up.

Not long after, she saw him sitting by himself in the student union, eating a burger with lettuce and tomato pushed to the side.

“Your mom would be disappointed in you for not eating your vegetables,” she said.

“I don’t have a mom,” he responded.

Carrie Gunn had died unexpectedly a month earlier. The family lived in Milwaukee, but Derrick wanted a change of scenery, so he moved to California for college.

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Trish told her mother, Adela, about her classmate. She instructed her daughter to invite him for dinner. Before long, they began dating. By 1982, they were married.

After graduating, Gunn began working as a television sports anchor. It was not the easiest lifestyle. He worked weekends and late nights. When he moved on to a new market, Trish moved with him — from El Centro, Calif., to San Diego, to Milwaukee, to Pittsburgh, to Philadelphia — which made holding a full-time job difficult for her.

The pastor had felt a spiritual calling since she was young, but it took her a while to figure out what that would look like. Growing up in Calexico, Calif., she gravitated to students who struggled to fit in. She began attending Mass regularly in high school, waking up at 6:45 a.m. so she could go before class.

For a while, Trish thought about becoming a nun but ultimately decided against it because she wanted to have kids of her own. She worked for five years as an esthetician and makeup artist, but after giving birth to the first of their three children in 1987, she became a stay-at-home mother.

This was how it remained until 1997, when Trish was hired as a children’s pastor at Wilmington First Assembly of God Church (now New City). The family had just moved to Delaware because of Derrick’s new job as an anchor on Comcast SportsNet, and Trish had recently begun attending a school of biblical studies.

A local pastor needed help with the children’s ministry and offered her a job. It felt like the perfect fit; a way to not only work in the church, but with the young people to whom she’d always felt connected.

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“The minute I got up on the stage, I knew that that was what I was called to do,” she said. “It was like putting on a piece of clothing that fits you so nicely.”

Trish worked at New City for 13 years. She didn’t do the job half-heartedly. She’d volunteer for vacation Bible school, winter retreat camps, and summer camps, often bringing Derrick along to help.

At first, he was hesitant. Covering the Eagles demanded much of his energy; now he was using his vacation time to corral a group of campers. But he came to find fulfillment in it.

“Ministry work is a lot of thankless work,” Derrick said. “But when you see those kids years later, and you see what they’re doing, you know it was worth it.”

In 2010, Trish took a sabbatical and worked as a guest speaker at local churches and women’s groups. Five years later, she was hired as an executive pastor at Trinity Community Church. Through it all, she and her husband continued to find ways to give back outside of their day jobs.

They’d lend money to single mothers. They’d let members of the church stay with them for extended periods of time. One young woman, who was part of their ministry, was in a verbally abusive relationship. She was kicked out of her partner’s house in Florida and had nowhere to go.

“She called her mom, and her mom said, ‘Just go stay with the Gunns,’” Derrick said. “We didn’t know she was coming until she was halfway here. There was no way we were going to say no. She stayed with us for almost a year.”

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In 2022, the lead pastor at Trinity, T.J. Harris, asked Trish if she’d consider returning to New City. The church was struggling and needed direction, and Harris thought Trish could provide some.

She agreed, and became lead pastor at the church while continuing to work as an executive pastor at Trinity. It was meant to be a temporary arrangement but quickly became all-consuming. Trish would attend staff meetings at both churches, hold one-on-one meetings with congregants during the week, and pastor on weekends. She’d often work until 2, 3, or 4 in the morning.

“She never slept,” Derrick said. “The next thing you know, she’s up at 8 a.m. because she has another meeting.”

On Nov. 3, 2023, the night before the stroke, the Gunns watched a movie at home. After it ended, Derrick looked at his wife. He could see that she was exhausted.

“Are you OK?” he asked.

“People have been asking me that all day,” Trish replied. “They’ve been telling me I look tired.”

Trish didn’t drink. She didn’t smoke. She watched her weight and walked 5,000 steps a day. But despite all of her efforts, the pastor’s first instinct was to wonder what she had done to cause such a devastating health event. Perhaps she’d angered God. Or ignored one of his messages.

Derrick thinks the stroke could have been stress-related. To date, no doctor has been able to give the Gunns a definitive answer. There may not be an answer. What is undeniable, though, is the impact the illness has had on both of their lives.

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Nothing has been spared. Trish has lost the essentials — short-term memory recall and the ability to move freely — but also her daily rituals. She was a skilled baker and loved to swim and spend mornings at Rehoboth Beach, sipping coffee on the boardwalk.

She took pride in her appearance, making sure her makeup and hair were done before her husband woke up. Now, her makeup routine takes hours. Derrick does her hair. He picks out her clothes and dresses her in the morning.

Trish can’t drive herself to appointments. She can’t fix something in the kitchen. She can’t go to the bathroom or shower on her own. For someone who was fiercely independent, it has been a frustrating experience.

Derrick has lost some independence, too. He hasn’t worked a full-time job since the stroke. The cadence of his life, once marked by the rhythms of free agency, training camp, and Eagles games, is now determined by his wife’s doctor appointments.

This year, he will do an Eagles pregame and postgame show with Marc Farzetta and Seth Joyner on Joyner’s YouTube channel, but even that will require careful planning. He can’t work a full-time job without hiring a certified nurse assistant, but the Gunns can’t afford one.

So for now, they wait until Trish’s condition improves.

“I feel isolated,” Derrick said. “My focus has always been keeping tabs on football, doing stats, talking to people, getting information, stories. I don’t do much of that now. My focus is being on the phone with doctors.

“I’m antsy. I want to work. I don’t even care if it’s in broadcasting anymore. I tell people, I could go to work at Costco or Cabela’s and be just as happy. I like to be busy. I’m busy morning until night now, but I feel like I’m living in the movie Groundhog Day. Every day is the same day.”

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From the beginning of their relationship, Trish and Derrick talked about helping each other through the aches and pains of old age. But no one anticipated a lifestyle change this drastic and this sudden.

So, when Trish was released from the hospital, she presented her husband with a choice. “This is my sentence, not yours,” she told him. “You can leave if you want.”

Derrick refused to entertain it.

“She has extended herself beyond belief,” Derrick said. “She has taken care of the family. She’s taken care of other people’s families that we call family.

“A lot of people walk away from stuff like this. That thought never crossed my mind. I will never abandon someone I’ve been with for over four decades.”

One thing they haven’t lost is their sarcasm. Trish likes to call her husband “the warden.” Derrick likes to make fun of her cosmetic needs — the face creams, the eyelash appointments, the nail appointments.

“There is so much involved,” he said, “from the hair to the makeup to the creams.”

Said Trish: “The next thing I know, I look at him, and he’s trying to copy my skincare routine. He tries to use my products.”

Laughter has helped. So has the church. When Trish first got sick, some congregants started sending checks in the mail. Others tucked $50 or $100 bills into get-well-soon cards.

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One friend started a GoFundMe that raised more than $35,000. Another remodeled their downstairs bathroom, so it could be wheelchair-accessible, for free. Another paid their mortgage for three months.

The Gunns were given so much food after Trish’s stroke that they couldn’t fit it all into their refrigerator. Initially, these gestures were hard to accept. They normally were the ones who gave, not the ones who received. But they’ve learned to embrace the change.

“It’s amazing,” Derrick said. “You pour into people with no expectations of anything other than that this is what you’re called to do. And then, when something like this happens, you realize how many people rally around your cause. Because of what you’ve done for them.”

Throughout her rehab, Trish stayed in close contact with Harris. They’d talk about her return to pastoring and how that would work. Sometimes, she’d text him and say, “I’m ready,” only to call back a few minutes later and say, “I’m not.”

This past January, she began to attend church at Trinity again, with Derrick by her side. Before long, she was hanging around the altar after services, praying for whoever needed a prayer.

Trish now counsels multiple congregants a week, by Zoom, phone, and in-person at a local coffee shop. The pastor hasn’t shied away from talking about her stroke; if anything, she has found that it has deepened her connections.

A couple of weeks ago, a woman approached Trish at Trinity. She was hunched over a walker and asked for a prayer. Trish took her hands, closed her eyes, and prayed that she would be able to straighten her body and walk once more. She prayed for her independence.

“I started to feel like myself again,” she said.

There may not have been a reason for her stroke, but that doesn’t mean it was without purpose. Since Nov. 4, 2023, Trish has been taking notes. She wants to share her story in a sermon, a book, or some other format.

Derrick hopes that it will be at an altar. That his wife will stand up proud, like she once did, and deliver a message that’s entirely new.

“We just know that there’s a bigger testimony coming out of this,” he said, “and I can’t wait to hear it.”