He recalled his conversations with McNerney. "She had cancer, too. She can talk with me about my feelings because she's been there," the Bowie man said. "You can get some bad feelings with cancer. I've had days I thought I wouldn't make it. She warned me I would, so when I had them, I thought about her.
"She don't talk from a book. She talks from the heart."
The purpose of the navigator program is to remove as many barriers to treatment as possible, said Dr. Patricia Hoge, who oversees the program for the South Atlantic Division of the American Cancer Society. The ACS is evaluating the program to see if it actually improves outcomes.
"It's like being plunged into an abyss when you hear the words, `You've got cancer,'" Hoge said. "Sometimes the person just gets tired or frustrated or angry and their ... reaction is, `I'm not going to do this anymore,' and they just need somebody to talk to."
That's where someone like McNerney comes in.
"All of us, when we go in to see a physician, we know they have limited time, they have other sick people they need to see," Hoge said. "The navigators are not on a schedule of having to see another patient in 10 minutes. They can take a couple of minutes or a couple of hours, and that's OK."
Anne McNerney's infectious personality screams triumph. "People just need to see there's life after cancer - good life," McNerney said.
They call her a navigator, "which sounds like an SUV," she quips. But she has a different view.
"I almost wish we could call ourselves `hope coaches,'" she said. "They might tell you you have a 90 percent chance of making it. You don't care. You've been diagnosed. You think you're in the 10 percent. That's your mind frame," she said.
She also reminds patients that they are not the statistics. Statistics are the people "who went before you."
"I think everyone has the opportunity to get better," she said.
McNerney may be the only nonmedical person a patient meets going through treatment - a sympathetic ear and someone who can talk through things as a peer. When a patient has qualms about getting a port - a disc inserted under the skin to make chemotherapy easier - she shows the scar on her chest from her port, and explains why it might be a good idea to get one.
"It's tremendous comfort and reassurance to meet a survivor, especially someone like Anne, who looks as though she's never been sick a day in her life," said Dr. Kevin J. Cullen, the director of the University of Maryland's Greenebaum Cancer Center.
Raymond Conway Jr., 51, had a grapefruit-sized tumor removed last year from his chest cavity. The District Heights man said McNerney talks to him the way no one else can because she, too, has battled cancer. And won.
"You can have compassion. You can have love in your heart. But if you haven't been there, it's hard to help," he said. "People mean well, but there's nothing like talking to someone who knows."
stephanie.desmon@baltsun.com
