Chattanooga Times Free Press

CHATTANOOGA TIMES FREE PRESS

Adam Swafford, a 17-year-old Chattanoogan, lies in bed on the seventh floor of Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville waiting for a new heart. When he arrived at the hospital, his heart, which should be the size of a human fist, had swollen to the size of a cantaloupe. Dr. Frank Scholl, his cardiac surgeon, said that it was one of the largest he has ever seen.

Adam’s heart still beats, but his blood flows through the four canisters of a mechanical pump that enter his body at his abdomen. The canisters click and shudder as the machine vacuums blood from the main chambers of his heart and delivers it back through his circulatory system.

Iesha Jones planned to spend her 14th birthday last February shopping for clothes, getting her nails done and hanging out with her boyfriend. Instead, the Orchard Knob Middle eighth-grader spent the day in labor at Erlanger hospital and used her birthday money to buy clothes and diapers for her baby boy. “He messed up my whole birthday plan,” she said in June. “I wanted to go shopping, and I ended up having him.”

Still, she’s happy to share a birthday with her son, who is 7 months old.

On the floor of her dimly lit living room, Acquanitta Keith thumbed through a gray plastic box containing school registration papers, report cards and award certificates of her two school-age children. Her oldest daughter, Anamesha Hollins, now a fifth-grader at East Lake Elementary, has attended seven schools since kindergarten: four in Chattanooga, three in Knoxville.

Ooltewah Middle sixth-grader Price McGinnis feels differently about girls than he did last year. When he gets around girls at school, he said, he feels a weird combination of nervousness and happiness.
“When you’re talking to girls, you’re pretty much flirting,” said Price, 12, who has a girlfriend he sees at church on Wednesdays and Sundays. “It was like that a little bit in fifth grade, but it really hit in sixth grade.”

CHATTANOOGA TIMES FREE PRESS

The four members of Balls to the Wall did not practice at all for the first dodgeball game of the intramural season at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. In preparation, Daniel Garmon said, they watched Ben Stiller’s movie “Dodgeball” “like 30 times” and slurped raspberry slushies from the University Center immediately before the game.

About five minutes into a Saturday night wrestling match at Georgia Xtreme Wrestling in Rossville, Sam Young slipped out of the ring and grabbed a stop sign from beneath the platform.
As his opponents, Chip “Hazard” Brown and Jesse “Kilawaya” Harvey, fought to pin each other to the ground, Mr. Young hoisted himself back into the ring and cracked the sign twice over Mr. Brown’s back and once against his forehead.

The salt and pepper shakers on James Thornhill’s kitchen table are cheap, plastic and far from remarkable. Looking at them, you might assume that he has no taste in spice dispensers. But you would be wrong.

CHATTANOOGA TIMES FREE PRESS

As Chris Chesnutt, 35, of Chattanooga ascends Little Cedar Mountain with his one-eyed pit bull, Obie, he stops periodically to admire the grooves that the wind and rain have carved into the limestone boulders strewn about the trail.

Kathy Berger gave up on her high school education during her senior year at Tyner High after her English teacher threw 16 of her book reports in the trash because they were late. The year was 1940, and Ms. Berger had been so busy planting sweet potatoes and corn on the family farm that she hadn’t been able to complete her assignments on time.