Office manager/RN
In the late 1990s, a young nurse working in the neonatal unit at Vanderbilt Hospital met a shy young resident in the NICU. It took him a while to ask her out, she remembers. It seems fitting now that their relationship began in a room set up for miracles to happen, where the smallest patient weighed just 13 oz.
Dr. Gerald Johnson and his wife, Cathy – who serves as the office manager for All Heart Pediatric Care – have had a lifetime of miracles since.
“God has intervened in our life in all fashions,” she says.
After they married, the Johnsons moved to Cincinnati for a Cardiology Fellowship. They spent eight years at the Milton S. Hershey Medical Center and the Penn State Children’s Hospital in Hershey, Pennsylvania before moving to Chattanooga in 2011 to join the staff at Erlanger.
In 2002, Cathy began having severe headaches. They continued for about six months until she finally went to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN. Diagnosed with a brain tumor, one month later she had surgery to remove the mass in the center of her brain. “The tumor messed with my eyesight,” she explains, and the doctors told the Johnsons that she would not see normal again.
“But God worked a miracle for us,” she smiles, explaining that within two days, her eyesight was restored.
Dr. Johnson was born with a bicuspid aortic valve, a congenital heart defect. About a year after Cathy’s brain tumor, he began passing out, and the only solution was open-heart surgery.
“When Gerald was on the operating table, he died for a short while. He saw heaven. He’s colorblind, and cannot see the color green. But there, he saw green. He said it was wonderful, peaceful.”
Fast forward just a few short years: pregnant with twins, Cathy caught a cold. An ensuing infection affected her unborn children, and at 36 weeks, she had an emergency C-section. The boys weighed three pounds each, and were diagnosed with cerebral palsy: doctors predicted that neither would ever walk or talk.
Cathy became a stay at home mom to her special needs children. However, the family experienced yet another miracle: by the age of four, both boys were walking. They still required multiple therapies but today the boys are typical teenagers, attending middle school at Chattanooga Christian.
The Johnsons founded All Heart Pediatric Cardiology in 2017. Now, Cathy Johnson has come full circle, now serving as the office manager for her husband’s practice.
“We’ve been on all sides,” Cathy explains. “Gerald and I have each been the patient. We’ve been the parents of a child with a serious condition. And I’ve been the wife of a patient, he’s been the husband. We understand what our patients are going through.”