Recovery, chance encounters, and faith: meet PA student Andrew Barrios
Posted: April 2, 2023
For A.T. Still University-Arizona School of Health Sciences (ATSU-ASHS) Physician Assistant (PA) program student Andrew Barrios, PA, ’24, the path to becoming a PA hasn’t been an easy one. After struggling for years with addiction and achieving nearly a decade of sobriety, a chance encounter in a rideshare would change his path and lead him to where he is today.
“I was just a lost kid who didn’t really know left from right,” he said. “I got into what people usually do to survive in the streets, and for me that started off with prescription pills and then escalated to heroin. From 17 to 23, I was hooked.”
Born in Los Angeles, Barrios’ childhood was marred with hardships. He was in his early teens when he started experimenting with drugs, which he said was mainly due to childhood trauma.
In 2002, he moved to Arizona, where, after several years of active addiction, he said, “I kind of just had an epiphany that I can’t continue to do this. It was really my mom’s prayers and just knowing that I’m meant for more.”
After entering a year-long, faith-based recovery program in Idaho, Barrios achieved sobriety on Nov. 25, 2013, and since then has reignited his passion for education, specifically in medicine.
Before recovering, Barrios said he had always enjoyed school, but because of the countless distractions in his personal life, he was unable to thrive. After receiving his GED, Barrios decided to enroll in a community college in Idaho, after attaining just under a year of sobriety.
“At the time, I was living in a homeless shelter; that’s where the faith-based program was located. So I enrolled, and I started to recognize that I’m doing actually really good in school, especially the science classes. I always had this idea that it’d be cool to get into medicine,” he said.
“There’s two significant reasons that I was interested in medicine. For the first 10, 11 years of my life, I lived with my grandma, my parents split early on,” he explained. “She had Type 2 diabetes. I was with her all the time and I was just intrigued and fascinated.”
The second reason, Barrios explained, is due to his strong family history with drug addiction, including his own. He hopes to be the kind of provider who can help others avoid some of the mistakes he made, he said.
Barrios then attended Northwest Nazarene University in Nampa, Idaho, where he received a bachelor of science in biology. After deciding to return to Arizona to further his studies, he sought to pursue a master’s in medical nutrition at Arizona State University while working as a rideshare driver for Uber and Lyft.
“One of my rides happened to be an ATSU PA student. He and I just hit it off right off the bat,” Barrios said. “Within those few minutes, he was able to share a little bit, and it got me super intrigued because I want to be the type of personable provider and just focus on patient care.
“He said, ‘Look, if you’re serious about this, here’s my number, and you can call me and we can get together.’ I hit him up the next day, we got together at Starbucks, and we spent some time and he broke it all down,” he said.
This chance encounter led Barrios to apply for the program, joining the ATSU-ASHS PA class of 2023.
Unfortunately, due to a series of personal hardships during his first year, Barrios struggled to keep up with his studies and realized by the end of the didactic year he was completely burnt out.
“The PA program was super supportive and completely had my back. They allowed me to take a leave of absence to kind of process everything, and they allowed me to do that and rejoin with the class of 2024,” Barrios said. “I came back in October, and I feel so much better just mentally and emotionally.
“I will always be an advocate for A.T. Still University, because they’ve taken care of me in so many ways,” he added.
Barrios credits the strong relationship he built with ATSU-ASHS’ PA faculty for his ability to flourish in the program, and said he is thankful for the support he received that enabled him to put his mental wellbeing first.
After graduation, Barrios will serve for two years providing primary care health services in underserved communities as part of the National Health Service Corps Scholarship. He hopes to combine his personal experiences with the education received in ATSU’s PA program to be the best provider he can be.
And for anyone struggling with mental health, Barrios had this piece of advice: “Make sure to take care of yourself. If you can’t take care of yourself, how can you take care of others? And that looks different for everyone, but making sure that you’re whole. For me, in my situation, what helped me was opening up to others.”