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.
