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Forty years ago as a teenager, Kathy Dempsey was attending Tennessee Temple High School here and throwing newspapers as a substitute carrier for The Chattanooga Times.
Today, she is one of the top motivational speakers in North America. Her transition from one-time trauma nurse at Erlanger hospital to high-powered corporate consultant involves an inspirational personal story that has become the foundation of her talks.
Dempsey, who now lives in Scottsdale, Ariz., was here this week as the keynote speaker at a Tennessee Valley Credit Union training event at the Colonnade Center in Ringgold, Ga. She urges companies to shed old habits and practices and to embrace change.
Being a champion of change is something she learned through life experience, Dempsey says.
As a young trauma nurse at Erlanger, she was in the ER one day when emergency docs cracked the chest of a dying trauma patient to massage the man's heart - a last, usually futile, attempt to save a life.
"It's hard to believe, but back then we didn't wear gloves," Dempsey recalls. The patient ultimately died, and the family later shared that he had AIDS. Dempsey remembered she had a cut on her finger and immediately began to get a sinking feeling she might have been exposed.
It was 1986, early in the AIDS panic. In those early years, people who contracted the virus usually died quickly after their diagnosis, Dempsey recalls. The science on how the virus was transmitted was also evolving, so people were fearful of any contact with an AIDS-positive person.
Because of her training, Dempsey knew it might take up to a year to test positive for HIV-AIDS. Sure enough, she went through several rounds of negative testing before testing positive at age 27.
"For a while, I lost it," she says. "I was just a mess."
Her anxiety peaked one night while taking a class at UTC. Her instructor popped in a video called "Living With AIDS," and images of emaciated AIDS patients began to flicker across the screen.
She left class and drove to the parking lot of the Chattanooga Choo Choo, where she contemplated suicide. She knew from working previously in the ER exactly how many sleeping pills it would take to get the job done.
She had the pills, she says, when a woman stepped up and tapped on her window.
"You OK?" the woman asked.
Dempsey recognized the woman as a friend from work who had come looking for her, sensing her distress. The friend calmed her down. Dempsey still calls the episode a life-saving miracle.
Three months later, Dempsey experienced a second miracle. To the astonishment of her doctors, a follow-up test showed that she was negative for HIV-AIDS.
"I got my life back," she explains.
After a time, Dempsey moved to Memorial Hospital, where she was known as a resourceful, but quiet, administrator. At the urging of her supervisor, she got training in public speaking and became a more vocal leader, she says.
In the winter of 1999, she says, she had a "burning bush" moment on a mountaintop in Hawaii where she felt a call to become a motivational speaker, touting the virtues of change and renewal.
Since then, she has written five books and been voted a Top 5 speaker for 2013 and 2014 by Speaker.com. Her clients include Disney, Wal-Mart, Verizon Wireless and Wells Fargo.
On her trip back to Chattanooga this week, Dempsey booked a room at - where else? - the Chattanooga Choo Choo, where she almost took her life all those years ago.
"I love Chattanooga," she says wistfully.
A professional collector and teller of stories now, Kathy Dempsey knows a happy ending when she lives one.
Contact Mark Kennedy at mkennedy@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6645.