A few years later, her husband suggested she volunteer at St. Agnes Hospital near their Ten Hills home, where she had been treated. Absolutely not, she said. "I don't even drive by that hospital without feeling waves of nausea," she told him.
In the end, she returned to the place that cured her. She volunteered at St. Agnes. She was there so often that they gave her a job.
In 2005, she came to the University of Maryland as the American Cancer Society's first patient navigator in the region that stretches from Delaware to Georgia (The ACS and the hospital share her salary). Now there are 30, with more navigators planned.
Today, at 55, Anne McNerney works the sunny cancer treatment room on the hospital's ground floor as if she is greeting old friends. And that's how many have come to think of her. She knows what illnesses they have. She knows their prognoses. She knows about their children, their troubled marriages.
Sometimes their needs are simple: McNerney points them toward support groups, explains counseling options, finds help to pay for parking if the patient is strapped for cash. She might offer a list of outside organizations that can help with bigger expenses.
Sometimes their needs are more complicated.
McNerney recalls a patient coming off radiation therapy last year who had no more treatment options. The only possibility was the clinical trial of an experimental drug. But to qualify, he was required to have a telephone.
The man's illness had left him destitute. He could no longer work. He was renting a room in someone else's home. He couldn't afford a phone.
A nurse called McNerney. Could she find him a cell phone? McNerney wasn't sure. She made some calls, and eventually the hospital's social work department got him a prepaid cell phone.
She recently saw the man. "He's really fine now," she marveled. "He got this phone and it turned it around for him."
The hospital's treatment room is lined with individual cubicles with comfortable chairs and television sets and curtains that can be drawn for privacy as patients settle in for what can be hours of chemotherapy.
On a recent day, McNerney spotted Oliver Johnson and gave his shoulder a little squeeze. A year ago, Johnson, 53, had his cancerous left lung removed. He had chemotherapy, but a few weeks ago, the cancer came back. This time in his lymph nodes.
