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

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.”

Alumni profiles

Mary Anne Wallace ’63 On the waterfront: a ministry of presence

Up close with Moe O'Rourke ’80 takes a very personal approach to healing

Mary Anne Wallace ’63
On the waterfront: a ministry of presence