9/11/2001 Emory Parkway Medical Center, Lithia Springs, Georgia

Where were you on 9/11/2001? So many people have been born since then. I was at Emory Parkway Medical Center, Lithia Springs, GA for 3 shifts as their chaplain. My nephew gave me his medal. He was at Fort Polk, where the President was supposed to be in case of attack on our country. And then he went to Iraq for a year. I trusted 27 ordained men to support the hospital. I was verbally told the hospital was interested in hiring me as a chaplain. My CPE supervisors had told me in many ways I just wasn't good enough. I didn't get Advanced CPE. The crazy thing about that? The first unit I did as a chaplain was doctoral level education.

How was CPE going to surpass doctoral classes in tearing down people? They don't have "advanced" anymore. There are no "advanced" levels of CPE. There are men who have no training to be chaplains who were pastors with a retirement plan who get a job in institutions. They were no better, and had no training for what chaplains did. They still get opportunities without CPE and win over women. Jobs have 60 applicants for chaplains.  I also went through Clinical Pastoral Education before Anita Hill was a whistleblower for Clarence Thomas. So I went through sexual harassment with a doctor. I was told to write him a letter of apology for removing his hand in front of patients. Later he lost his license to practice medicine because of a lawsuit. The patient went on Larry King and talked about him. 

I had 10 interviews at major hospitals, prisons, and for the Jacksonville Police Department. The men always got the job. A question was asked at the Police Department about how many people I had told someone had died. In hospitals only the doctor can do that. Showing up at the elevator or in the waiting room is enough for people to know someone died just by seeing a chaplain, and people knew I was a chaplain. Many times a chaplain doesn't have to speak.

So what did I do on 9/11/2001? I got the Gideon Bibles out and put them in waiting rooms (not the patient's rooms). No hospital official had allowed Gideons to place Bibles in rooms during the 4 years I had volunteered with full credentials. I let people look at my kaleidoscope, and take a minute to relax, especially people in the ER, ICU, and the three people in the building who had relatives in the World Trade Center. I had already talked to my friends in New York and at the Pentagon. Ray Woolridge had emailed me asking me to go to the hospital. Out of 27 volunteers, I was the only ordained woman with a degree. One woman was ordained with no degree. She was black and did not show up on 9/11. We had lunch later. I am friends with Ray Woolridge, US Army RET Brigadier General on LinkedIn. He was in Alabama on 9/11 with his soldiers. He was not yet working at the Pentagon as a General.

Five months after 9/11/2001 the hospital closed. Two years later the building was leveled and a Home Depot was built in the same spot. Charlie Brown Airfield is 5 seconds away from that spot. Home Depot is much safer than the 11 story glass hospital. On 9/11/2001, there was no sprinkler system in the building. I emailed Bob Sheiffer/Shieffer about this hospital. He wasn't interested in it as a story. No one did a story on it. Instead the story was that no one was using the hospital and it was old (27 years is old?). It was the only hospital on I-20 with an ER. They increased the beds of Douglasville's hospital to 23+ rooms in the ER, Villa Rica's hospital had 75 million pumped into making it bigger and "state of the art." Both hospitals are not close to the perimeter of Atlanta or to an airport. They are on I-20 for the accident victims and area.

What do I remember most about 9/11/2001? People who had treated me like a "female usurper" trying to take a man's spot in ministry started calling me Chaplain. I had been wearing the badge for nearly 4 years, and the women started calling me Chaplain for the first time.

Some of the 27 male pastors decided that they didn't want a woman chaplain when I called and told them I might be hired, and would they still be available to volunteer? They called the hospital and said they didn't want me as chaplain to the CEO. I went to the EEOC (where Anita Hill used to work) and made a complaint. They investigated and said I could go back and get references. The women did not want me to sue Emory Hospital for sexism. The CEO had been fired. I got a reference letter signed by one nurse and then I left the building. I remember the Birch tree outside the hospital entrance. It was huge. When the building was torn down, the tree was also removed. I think of it as The Giving Tree.

I joined a church where the head of security was in my Bible study group and he made fun of me. Hope Church in Hiram is a United Methodist Church that will not use women in the pastorate and keeps it secret that it is United Methodist. Nothing on the signs telling people it is Methodist. We only stayed there a year.

When I was ordained in 1987, only about 400 women had been ordained in the Southern Baptist Denomination. In 1999 when the Southern Baptist Denomination stopped allowing ordination and the Alliance of Baptists and the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship became home for all the ordained women who didn't become Episcopal or something else, I had already started a non-profit ministry. I retired this April. I was a pioneer. I have no retirement, no 401K, no social security. I did not die on 9/11/2001. The first casualty at the World Trade Center was the Chaplain on this date.