Alumni profiles
Mary Anne Wallace ’63
On the waterfront: a ministry of presence
The Seafarer’s Friend is just what it says. Lonely sailors
working the oil tankers and cargo ships for stretches of up to nine
months can find friendship in port through this maritime ministry
group. Mary Anne Wallace ’63 manages the nonprofit’s
local office out of the Marine Trade Center on Portland’s waterfront,
where it provides care and compassion along with clothing, magazines,
phone cards and just about anything else foreign crews need when they
make it to port.
Her work directly supports the chaplain who actually boards the
ships to spend time with the crews, but she also works closely with
donors and volunteers. Her duties are varied, however, and last year
at Christmas time, she helped to pack more than 1,800 gifts for the
seafarers.
Wallace grew up fascinated by the sea and knew the names of all the
Portland wharves, the Coast Guard cutters and the Casco Bay Lines
boats. A school and college librarian for nearly 20 years, she is
now happy to work near those wharves whose names she knew by heart.
A serious student of Tai Chi and a volunteer for the Maine Writers
Index, Wallace has never lost her passion for books. In fact, she
has wonderful memories of Sister Stephanie’s cultured and rich
explanations of required readings for literature class – and
of sitting in the Saint Joseph’s library filled with a
sense of “the luxury of reading.”
Mary Anne Wallace
Portland, Maine
B.A. Saint Joseph’s College, 1963
M.L.S. University of Maine, 1977
M.A. University of Southern Maine, 1993
Up close with Moe O'Rourke ’80
takes a very personal approach to healing
A clinical professor of nursing at the University
of North Carolina-Greensboro, Moe O’Rourke ’80, wearing
both her Saint Joseph’s nursing pin and Boston Red Sox stickers
on her lab coat, switched from an academic faculty position at the
university because she missed patient contact.
Through many years of working as a nursing professor, Maureen O’Rourke
’80 has learned that cancer patients can find healing
in unlikely places. Thai restaurants, for example.
One of her terminally ill patients, an immigrant from Thailand, had
no family members living in the United States. Each day, O’Rourke
would enter her hospital room only to hear that her patient was “feeling
blue.” The nurse decided to try a novel way to elicit a different
response. She painted her face blue and arrived with a recording of
the pop song, “Blue”: “I am blue… I have
a blue house with a blue window…” She invited her patient
to sing along.
Over the subsequent weeks, O’Rourke visited the patient each
day after finishing her teaching responsibilities. She learned
of the woman’s dream to open a restaurant and resolved to help
her to realize this goal. They pored over menus, chose the entrees,
and imagined the interior decor. They settled on a name, “The
Blue Thai,” and designed the logo. They even looked into applying
for a small-business loan.
“It was never going to happen – we both knew it. But
it happened,” says O’Rourke, noting that at the time of
her death, the woman felt the satisfaction of having achieved her
dream. “Not in reality, no restaurant ever opened, but we came
as close to it as possible.”
O’Rourke, who prefers to be called by her nickname, Moe, adheres
to a philosophy of nursing that she learned as an undergraduate at
Saint Joseph’s College. Now a nursing professor at the University
of North Carolina-Greensboro, she counsels her students to look beyond
the patient’s MRI results and blood counts to respond to the
person’s deepest needs.
“The art of nursing is still that gentle connecting with people’s
human spirit. I think that gets lost in all the technology,”
she says. “Sister Consuela (founder of the Saint Joseph’s
nursing program) taught us that anything is possible when a patient
has hope.”
O’Rourke has learned first-hand about the transformative
power of hope. She recalls several instances in her own life when
circumstances seemed to conspire against her. By the second year into
her doctoral program in nursing, for example, she was juggling her
studies with caring for her 4-year-old daughter and 1-year-old son.
She was commuting 90 miles each way to the University of North Carolina
in Chapel Hill. Then she was diagnosed with the autoimmune disease,
lupus.
“I thought it was the end of the world … I took a semester
off because I thought I was dying,” she says. “Then it
occurred to me – what if I live to be 80 and I’m just
sitting around doing nothing? So I went back.”
She eventually completed the doctorate, along with groundbreaking
research into the quality of life for prostate cancer patients. She
began her interview-based study in the early 1990s at a point when
a newly developed screening test, Prostate-Specific Antigen
Test, helped identify thousands of new cases of the disease.
She feels gratified by her contributions to research as well
as other scholarly work. She was one of the founding editors of the
Clinical Journal of Oncology Nursing and associate editor of a second
journal, Cancer Investigation, for seven years. She’s given
numerous addresses for national and international oncology nursing
conferences. On the eve of one recent speech, the Trish Greene Memorial
Quality of Life Lecture, her husband and children decorated their
home and threw her a surprise party.
“(The Trish Greene award) is a very high honor in our society
– that’s a once-a-year memorial lecture, always on a quality-of-life
topic,” says Leonard Mafrica, publisher for the Oncology Nursing
Society. He adds that O’Rourke has published numerous articles
in the society’s journals, contributed to several books, and
helped guide the editorial direction of the society’s clinical
journal.
Despite these successes in academic pursuits, she discovered that
her primary interest lay elsewhere. About five years ago, she
held a tenure-track faculty position at University of North Carolina,
Greensboro. Though the job was the realization of a longtime goal,
she made the difficult choice to give it up.
“I decided I didn’t want to be in a tenured position.
I gave it a lot of thought and … I realized it wasn’t
really what I wanted because it took me away from the bedside,”
she says. “I really like to be at the bedside. It’s why
I went into nursing – to be with patients.”
After switching to a part-time, clinical professor role, she shifted
more attention to the needs of her own teen-aged children. She offers
her house as the “haven” for teen-agers to congregate
after school. She supports her children’s interests that range
from playing basketball to volunteering for political campaigns. She
also takes pride in the fact that they willingly contribute to cooking,
cleaning, and doing the laundry.
Her husband, a physician who specializes in rheumatology, has given
her invaluable support in managing her own illness. Lupus is a chronic,
incurable disease in which the body’s immune system becomes
hyperactive and attacks its own healthy tissue. She must receive infusions
of drugs similar to those used in chemotherapy treatment for cancer.
The aftereffects – fever, chills, and flu-like symptoms
– help her to empathize with her cancer patients who must endure
such interventions far more frequently.
“It has given me a real appreciation for what people have to
go through,” she says. “I’m always grateful when
I’m feeling well. I’m not particularly grateful on the
days I’ve got to get the chemo, but it’s temporary, it
passes.”
She channels that empathy into her nursing practice by making sure
she knows her patients in a very personal way. Her mentors and former
Saint Joseph’s College professors couldn’t have predicted
the course of O’Rourke’s career, but they are certainly
not surprised that she has achieved success in nursing.
“She did grasp what the essence of nursing is,” says
Sister Consuela White, who maintains a daily presence at Mercy Hospital
in Portland. “That philosophy, that modus operandi, must have
been evident to her. She must have identified very closely with
it, because she captured it and she developed it further.”
When O’Rourke looks back on her decades-long career, not only
the high-profile moments at the podium stand out. She also recalls
a blue-faced sing-along with a terminally ill patient. She remembers
planning every detail of the Blue Thai until the restaurant became
a reality in another woman’s mind.
“The connection that I had with (my patient) was incredible.
And it taught me a lot about hope, that you can be joyful even though
it ends up difficult in the final moments,” she says.
“There are a lot of things that are worse then death –
suffering is one and to have no joy in your life is another.”
Moe O’Rourke was one of the founding editors
of the Clinical Journal of Oncology Nursing and associate editor of
a second journal, Cancer Investigation. She also conducted groundbreaking
research on quality of life for pancreatic cancer patients.
