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Important Information From Our Healthcare Leaders

5/28/2020

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As our region begins to reopen during the COVID-19 pandemic, we encourage businesses and community members to continue to follow governmental requirements and CDC guidelines to keep their employees and our residents safe from exposure to the virus. 
 
Our leaders and medical staffs continue to monitor the situation and partner with local government and public health offices in the effort to slow the transmission of the virus. 
 
While our emergency departments, primary and specialty care, urgent care, and emergency surgery services remain in operation, you will begin to see other services, such as elective procedures, gradually return over the next couple of weeks. Rest assured, we are still taking every precaution to reduce transmission of the virus within our hospitals and offices to mitigate the spread of the virus through the communities we serve. 
 
Our facilities remain safe as our employees are also following the CDC guidelines for healthcare workers and patients. You may notice certain restrictions, such as screening at entrances, limited visitation policies, and the use of personal protective equipment, are still in place at our facilities and offices. 
 
We encourage individuals to seek medical care in the event there is a medical emergency or if medical treatment is needed. We also have alternative options like telehealth for qualified appointments. Please don’t hesitate to contact our facilities if you have any questions about your appointments or medical care. 
 
Our advice to the community remains the same during the pandemic. Those who exhibit mild symptoms of COVID-19 should self-quarantine at home and maintain distance from family members who are not experiencing symptoms. Continue these precautions until 72 hours after symptoms have resolved (typically 10-14 days). If you have a fever of 100.4 or above OR respiratory symptoms, call your healthcare provider. If you do not have a healthcare provider, call the closest urgent care center. Please call ahead to the facility so care teams can ensure the safety of their providers, other patients, and you. If you have a medical emergency and need to call 911, notify the dispatcher that you have a respiratory illness. If possible, put on a face mask before help arrives.
 
We want to extend our sincerest appreciation to our staffs who continue to provide medical care to our patients, as well as to first responders and law enforcement serving on the frontlines, and area residents doing their part to prevent the spread of the virus. We also want to thank the hundreds of businesses, organizations, groups and individuals who donated supplies, meals, time, and monetary contributions to support our operations and healthcare heroes. We are extremely grateful for these many gifts and could not do the work we are doing now without the generous assistance of our community.

For the latest information about our policies and scheduling information for surgeries or procedures, visit the sites below:
  • www.chattmd.org
  • www.erlanger.org/coronavirus
  • www.memorial.org/coronavirus
  • www.parkridgehealth.com/covid-19 

For information about COVID-19 testing in your region, please call these numbers:
  • Alabama Public Health – 888-264-2256
  • Georgia Department of Public Health – 844-442-2681
  • Hamilton County Health Department – 423-209-8383
  • North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services – 866-462-3821
  • Tennessee Department of Health – 877-857-2945
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Karen Stone is a Mountain Icon: Part 1

5/4/2020

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It’s no wonder that Karen Paul Stone is so passionate about history, especially the history of Walden’s Ridge. Six generations of her family have either summered or lived full-time there, and she grew up on stories of bygone days and ancestors’ exploits. Her mother’s grandmother held the keys to Signal Mountain Methodist, which she and her grandchildren now attend, and she still lives in the house she grew up in. In fact, the house has been significant in every aspect of Karen’s life.  As the saying goes, “if those walls could talk.”

Karen’s parents, Sherman Paul and Katherine Lowry, were married on the porch of that house in 1942, and Karen was brought to live there immediately after her birth in 1944. Before her first birthday, she experienced her first fire on the bluff below. Tucked safely on the couch within her mother’s reach for a quick exit should the fire crest the brow, Karen slept “like a baby” while her father, with a “trickle of water” from their well and an army blanket, and her mother, with a rake, frantically beat out sparks. There were more fires over the years, which Karen remembers vividly.

“Fires used to be so tragic on the mountain. Houses burned down around us. There was no hope of putting them out. We could only help people carry the furniture out,” she said. (These experiences led her father to help create a water system for the mountain and establish Walden Ridge Emergency Services.) But Karen’s prodigious memory overflows with happy memories made in the house, too, including her marriage to Charlie Stone in 1969, her daughter Kristina’s wedding reception in 1999, and her son Paul’s rehearsal dinner in 2001.

Childhood was idyllic for Karen. A leap year baby, she delights in telling everyone she just turned 19 and watching them silently multiply.  But she wasn’t cheated out of birthday parties: she had two each year - one for girls, one for boys - on Feb 28 and March 1.  She rode horses all over the mountain, with her friend Ruth Smith Irvin and others, and often rode in the horse ring on the McCoy Farm. That may have been the genesis of her love of the place. “I’m fanatic about McCoy,” she says. By her own admission, Karen is fanatic about a lot of things. A self-described “historian and busy-body,” Karen will tell you, “I have the pointiest nose. It’s always in everybody else’s business.”

Her love of history was instilled by her parents and grandparents. Their ancestors came from England, Ireland, and Wales and included Mayflower passenger Priscilla Mullins Alden; John Paul, who added Jones to his name later; and Thomas Stone, one of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence. The family stories extolled the virtues of hard work, dependability, and adventure, and Karen absorbed them all, while also learning to discern history from folklore, which she studied in college. “I love story-telling, so I’m sensitive to the fact that the themes have continued since before people could write … the details just get changed around.”

She also loved the words themselves. Her schoolbooks, from Margaret Wilson Elementary through Girls Preparatory School (where she attended on a Coca-Cola Co. scholarship) are full of notations and definitions, and she still has a collection of dictionaries. Both family and school emphasized the classics and she haunted the public library. It seems almost inevitable that she would one day become a publisher.

Her love of horses and language led her to attend the University of Kentucky (“all those beautiful horse farms”) where she double majored in French and Spanish, and spent a summer working in the Paris department store Au Printemps as an interpreter and personal shopper.  With her major courses, plus classes in German and Italian, non-verbal gestures, and a lot of creativity, she could deduce what was needed. “My pride and joy was the person who came in who spoke Russian and I helped her. That was amazing, because I’d only studied the most elementary Russian.”  Years later, Karen, along with husband Charlie and their 11-year-old son Andy, was Chattanooga’s Ambassador of Good Will to Argentina with the Experiment in International Living. They lived with families in each of three cities; Karen interpreted, Andy created a unit for fifth graders for the Kentucky schools, and Charlie photographed the Inca Trail. Afterwards, she gave nearly 200 speeches about her experiences “to pay Chattanooga back for the sponsorship.”

Karen had met Charlie Stone, a professional photographer, in Kentucky. “We married on a Saturday,” said Karen, “and Monday, went to his office to check the mail. His secretary said, ‘Sit right down here, honey. Your husband can’t afford a secretary and a wife, too. You’ve got ’til 5 p.m. to learn how to run the books … I’ll be gone for two weeks. You can call me after that if you need to.’ It was the greatest thing anybody ever did for us because we started working together the second day of our marriage and haven’t stopped for 50 years.”

Realizing that their livelihood depended entirely on Charlie, the couple broadened their earning power by buying a little printing company in Lexington, building it up and then buying Transylvania Printing Company, the oldest printing company west of the Alleghenies. The original press was carried over the mountains by donkeys and mules in 1884, then reassembled to print books for Transylvania University, Kentucky’s first university. The company later separated from the school and the Stones renamed it Ashland Press after Henry Clay’s home; they lived on part of that property for a while and in time were joined by four children: Andy, Cathy, Kristy, and Paul.

Karen, and her brother Don, a professional actor who is seven years younger, grew up with creative, accomplished parents devoted to public service. Her father, a professional artist who taught art at Kirkman Technical School and McKenzie College, was also the director of the Dale Carnegie Courses for the southeastern United States. Her mother, a professional ballerina, taught physical education and dance to “half the little girls of Chattanooga,” and worked at the YMCA. Both volunteered in civic organizations and community events: he in JCs, Rotary, Optimists, Civic League and she as director of the Cotton Ball for 20 years. Sometimes children or adults in need lived with them for a time, and Karen picked wildflowers to brighten their rooms. Her parents’ friends “were leaders … for the community good, and they became my friends and inspiration, too,” she said. At age 4 or 5, she was passing out Christmas gifts at the YWCA or riding on her daddy’s shoulders “as he waded through the barking dogs [to persuade] people to buy into the new water system.” She learned early that “one did what one could … the power of one person has always been my continuing theme.”

Throughout her life, Karen has done what she could. Still in touch with members of her original sixth grade Signal Mountain Girl Scout troop, Karen later served for 10 years as leader of her daughter’s troop, then served for many more on its board of directors. In college, she was a “busy-body” in the French and Spanish honor societies and “harassed” freshman in the dorm as a freshman advisor. In Lexington, as a board member of the Art and Advertising Council, she helped run a capital campaign to construct an Arts and Advertising Center. One of her life’s proudest accomplishments is having “teamed up with the Kentucky Agricultural Extension Agent to found the Farmer’s Market there.”

Sixth grade seems to have been a watershed year for Karen. With Girls Scouts came another life-long passion - hiking - and the “hiking maniac” still leads a hiking group on the mountain. That same year she also became devoted to “saving Moccasin Bend from destruction.” Her father was president of the Moccasin Bend Association and she “became passionate about that cause,” later serving on the Friends of Moccasin Bend’s board from 1995 to 2018. During that time, Moccasin Bend entered the National Park Service as the first National Archeological District, then became National Park Partners with Chattanooga-Chickamauga National Military Park in 2018.

Karen then moved on to her next passion, the McCoy Farm and Gardens, and now serves on that board, writing the newsletter, handling publicity, and “stir[ring] up as much trouble as I can.” She is also a long-time member of the Walden’s Ridge Guild, which contributes in myriad ways to the betterment of the mountain, including supporting WRES, which her dad helped establish. And for 20 years, in her spare time, she was the historian for the Little Brown Church in the Wildwood.

The Stone family returned to Walden’s Ridge in 1985, after her father died and her mother felt unable to manage the family home. They moved into the house, and Karen’s mother built a place next door where her son Paul now lives with his wife Dana and three of the Stones’ 15 grandchildren: Julia, John, and Carly.

It may seem that Karen, raising four children and “stirring up trouble” everywhere, might have chosen to forego a career, but she did not, and that is a story in itself. A woman of boundless energy, she and her husband Charlie, “a serial entrepreneur,” have built several successful businesses over the years. Part Two will explore some of them.
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by Carol Lannon
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White Star Dry Cleaners Receive Award

5/4/2020

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His family has lived on Signal Mountain for five generations and he bought his dry-cleaning business from his parents. To say that Rob Whitmire was born into this locally owned business is an understatement.

“That’s me playing baseball as a White Star baseball player,” said Rob. “My parents started the business in 1960. I got into the business because I grew up in it and saw the advantages it would offer for family life.” Sixty years later, he and his wife of 28 years, Lois, have nurtured their business into a nationally award-winning company.

The Award of Excellence is the premier recognition program for professional members of the Drycleaning and Laundry Institute. To achieve the award, White Star Dry Cleaners must prove it meets rigorous, objective standards in cleaning and service. Most importantly, the company must clean and return a specialized Cleaning Performance Evaluation to prove their cleaning quality is among the best. In addition, the company must successfully remove six common, but difficult, stains on a silk swatch and return it for evaluation.

Four times - that’s how many times White Star has entered and won. “The stain swatch is very difficult; they do tell you what the stains are and that helps. The contest has helped us become a better dry cleaner,” Rob said.

The Whitmires purchased White Star from Rob’s his parents, Joann and Ralph, in 2015. Rob is proud to tout the modifications and modernization White Star has undertaken. “We have gone to heat seal barcode production system to streamline production and auto bagging machine to speed up production. We have added 24-hour drop off at most locations, added 24-hour pickup at the Signal Mountain store, purchased new delivery vans and added free home and office pickup and delivery,” Rob said.

Rob and Lois raised their family on Signal, very close the Sequatchie County line. “We have three children, Hogan, Marie and Brooke. They all graduated from Signal Mountain High School, starting in 2011.The experience we have had at Signal Mountain High School was surreal. It was like living our old Red Bank High School days - I graduated in 1987. An incredible community-supported high school, success in academics, State Champion level sports programs,” Rob said.

Hogan graduated from Samford University and is now finishing up his third year of dental school. Marie also graduated from Samford and is working in marketing. Brooke, the youngest, is finishing up her third year at Samford and hopes to pursue a career in physical therapy or as a physician’s assistant.

Rob is grateful this business has afforded him and his family a wonderful quality of life. “It is a great family business, not requiring me to travel or sell a product, which I would not be good at, but instead provide a much-needed service where quality and service sells itself. I am much more of a worker and prefer the production side of things, while my wife Lois does an awesome job in the office and takes a lot of pressure off me there,” Rob said.

In these uncertain times, Rob and Lois have worked hard to keep the company running.

“COVID-19 has really changed our business. We have gone to drive-thru-only service at all locations and ask customers to take advantage of our 24-hour drop boxes. We are asking customers for credit card only transactions and not to sign receipts. We have segregated incoming orders completely from any area that has cleaned processed orders,” Rob said, adding that employees’ temperatures are checked before they are allowed to work and dirty garments are kept in quarantine until they can be processed by trained personnel in protective gear.
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by Michelle Michaud ​

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Richards Tests for COVID-19

5/4/2020

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When the good news broke in mid-March, the effect on our collective mood was positively therapeutic - the beginning of a turn away from fear and toward resilience. We’d been gobsmacked by the reality of how unprepared our institutions were to handle the novel virus, COVID-19. Quarantine, the novel solution, was still being robustly resisted, and discouragement about the future was widespread. The biggest issue was determining how many people were positive for the disease; insufficient testing and delays in processing them were creating a bottleneck. Without this information, containing and treating the pandemic seemed insurmountable. Everyone felt helpless.

Throughout the country, most hospitals and local labs don’t have the equipment to carry out the testing, so all the specimens from our region were being shipped to a lab in North Carolina, necessitating packing, shipping, checking in, testing, then reversing the process to return. There was also a shortage of the necessary chemical reagents. The backlog was increasing daily.   

Scientists/teachers Dr. Elizabeth Forrester and Dr. Dawn Richards had been “following the story from its inception,” out of concern for their students at Baylor School, especially those who board, said Forrester. They and their colleague, Dr. Mary Loveless, teach advanced science courses, such as molecular method, biomedical research, and engineering design, at Baylor, and thanks to an endowment from the estate of Elizabeth Weeks, the school has an astoundingly well-equipped laboratory. (The credentials of these exceptional teachers are listed at the end of the article).

Forrester, recognizing they already had the equipment needed to test for the virus, called Richards, the chairperson of Baylor Research, and said simply, “We can do this.” Richards agreed. “We wanted to help,” Forrester said, and because they’re local, she knew it would really speed up the process. At the same time, their students were watching as they carried out practice testing. “Our students realize[d] we had the capabilities in the laboratory. They’re smart! We knew they’d figure it out,” said Richards.

Baylor had to become certified by CDC, sort out legal issues, and comply with federal and state regulations. Due to the crisis, some regulations had been relaxed or ceded to the states, which created more confusion. The school was equipped to process about 65 tests a day, but if they could obtain the resources to “scale up” (add more equipment) they could increase that number considerably. Countless conversations and piles of paperwork followed. There were “lots of obstacles, roadblocks, long days, and late nights to figure it out,” Richards recalled, and Forrester added, “When we hit one roadblock, we would just problem-solve around it.”  

They wanted to “have the largest impact on the entire community” if possible, said Richards, and Mary Catherine Robbins, director of Baylor’s Health Center, was instrumental in establishing a partnership with Hamilton County. That was their goal - they all wanted to do as much as they could to help. Forrester put it this way: “The question wasn’t, ‘How can we do this?’ It was, ‘How can we NOT do this.’” 

Baylor possesses very sophisticated equipment (a nucleic acid extractor, an RNA transcriber, a biological safety cabinet, laminar flow hoods) that is used to process test specimens. They carry out an assay - an analysis to determine if a specific substance is present. For COVID-19, the first step is to extract the RNA from the specimen. Using a specific protocol, reagents (chemical compounds) are used to transcribe the RNA into DNA, which allows detection of coronaviruses. Specimens are picked up by a medical courier from doctors’ offices and hospitals, then delivered to Baylor. “Processing is less than four hours,” said Forrester, so the results can be returned the same day.

To accomplish this, a zealous team supported the women.  “So many people around us have said ‘how can I help?’ and got right to work,” said Richards. One of them is Dr. Loveless, a PhD in biomedical engineering. “I am supporting Dawn and Elizabeth in their efforts by continuing manufacturing effort,” Loveless said. Because Baylor has a Form2 3D printer, she is “seeking approval to manufacture [an FDA-approved ND swab] to prevent a shortage in test kits.”  She is also discussing future projects with her students for model design for swab sample capture, material selection for personal protection equipment (PPE), and processes for medical devices.

Like all teachers, these three continue during this crisis to work with students via technology, so this work is in addition to their regular duties. They are all wives and mothers, as well. “Our families are really stepping up,” said Forrester. Richards’ daughters “have been doing the laundry for weeks. They know we are leaving the house each day because we’re trying to help.” Forrester lives on Lookout and has three sons who attend Baylor and St. Nicolas. Richards’ daughter also attends Baylor; her son is in third grade at Nolan Elementary on Signal. And Loveless has two children, ages 5 and 7.

Recently, Grace McKenney, a Baylor alum and current premed student at University of Pennsylvania, volunteered to serve as “director of operations, working with onsite Health Department volunteers to coordinate patient information and reporting,” said Richards, and Forrester added, “She has been a godsend.” As they waited for one last instrument, two other scientists, Dr. Clint Smith and Dr. Alyssa Summers, have also been there, helping them prepare to increase capacity for testing to 300-plus.

As the news spread of their efforts, people came forward to contribute in whatever way possible. “The whole community is supporting us, offering to bring lunch, make dinner for our families,” said Forrester. They’ve received scores of emails and even got a call from someone offering to donate his stimulus check.  “That almost brought us to tears,” she said.

Their initiative and willingness to serve was just what the doctor ordered: an injection of hope, that local testing would enable health professionals to deal with the virus more quickly, with a booster of pride, that our city has such capable and creative educators who will step up on our behalf. What role models they are, for their students and for all of us. Elizabeth Forrester summed it up perfectly: “We are all doing our part.”  So must we.

Dr. Dawn Richards has an M.S. in Oceanography: Biogeochemical cycling and a Ph.D. in Microbial Ecology. Her interests include microbial community composition in soil, water, and biological systems and antibiotic resistance in the environment.

Dr. Mary Loveless has a B.S. in Computer Science: Computer Engineering and M.S./Ph.D. degrees in Biomedical Engineering. Her interests include embedded systems, mathematical modeling, and imaging.

Dr. Elizabeth Forrester has a B.S. in Chemistry from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and a Ph.D. in Cancer Biology from Vanderbilt University. Her interests include mammary tumorigenesis and metastasis, molecular genetics and epigenetics. 
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by Carol Lannon

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