She has dangled midair from a helicopter. She has treated the children of U.S. service members. And she has traveled the world for the U.S. Navy to make sure the service was ready to treat military and civilian casualties should an unimaginable military attack take place anywhere around the globe.
It’s not the typical background for a pediatric cancer physician. But Dr. Joanne McManaman is harnessing all that wisdom and experience to care for the region’s youngest cancer patients at St. Jude Affiliate Clinic at Novant Health Hemby Children’s Hospital in Charlotte.
The question that guides Dr. Joanne McManaman’s medical journey never changes: “How are we going to take care of the patients?”
McManaman is a pediatric hematologist and oncologist at St. Jude Affiliate Clinic at Novant Health Hemby Children’s Hospital in Charlotte. The clinic, across from Novant Health Presbyterian Medical Center, treats patients up to age 22 for cancer or blood disorders. Some 2,300 patients received care there in 2023.
Learn more about the St. Jude Affiliate Clinic at Hemby Children's Hospital.
McManaman was 6 years old when she decided she wanted to be a pediatrician. Her inspiration? Visits to her own pediatrician, Dr. Ruth Peters, in the Long Island town of Hicksville, New York. Forty-eight years later, McManaman can still feel the warmth from the tender care she received. She can still see in her mind’s eye the children’s drawings that hung on the office walls, proof that other kids felt the warmth there, too.
McManaman attended the University of Miami School of Medicine on a U.S. Navy scholarship. She graduated in 1994 and set out to honor her four-year Navy commitment, starting with an internship and residency in pediatrics at the Naval Medical Center in San Diego. She went on to serve 21 years in the Navy before retiring in 2015 with the rank of captain.
Her service included stints as a general pediatrician in Sicily, Italy, before a fellowship in pediatric hematology and oncology at Walter Reed Army Military Medical Center in Washington, D.C. Each assignment, she says, offered the privilege of treating the children of U.S. military families.
‘You get a sense of pride’
From 2008 to 2011, she experienced a privilege of another kind.
McManaman served as command surgeon responsible for a massive task force sharing the health perspective on a mission both vital and chilling: To plan the response to a chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or other deadly explosive incident in the United States. (It was called the Joint Task Force Civil Support (JTF-CS) based at Fort Monroe in Hampton, Virginia.)
The scenario that kickstarted the task force’s work? North Korea drops a nuclear bomb on a U.S. city. The task force’s goal: “Save lives, mitigate human suffering and prevent further injury.”
The assignment took McManaman all over the United States and to several countries in search of answers to life-and-death questions. How do we get planes and helicopters into the most devastated areas so patients can receive the best and fastest care? How do we decontaminate potentially thousands of people? How do we organize existing medical facilities and set up mobile, temporary new ones?
McManaman also helped develop a program to determine when troops are suffering from trauma and need to be removed from the field. In all, the plan she wrote for the medical task force surpassed 100 pages.
“You get a sense of pride working on a command like this,” she said. “It was definitely fascinating, definitely a privilege. We knew we were part of a command like no other in the country. Each year, U.S. Congress would call us a national treasure.”
It was while doing her part to save who knows how many lives that McManaman asked herself the question, “How are we going to take care of the people?”
One young patient at a time
She asks herself that same question at the St. Jude Affiliate Clinic in Charlotte. Only now, instead of focusing on an American city, her focus is on one young patient at a time.
McManaman’s commitment to treating cancer and blood disorders comes from a personal place. Her mother, Evelyn, 84, is a four-cancer survivor – thyroid, blood, breast and lungs. Her father, Tom, 92, survived kidney cancer.
Her arrival at the St. Jude Affiliate in 2018 also comes from a personal place.
McManaman and former St. Jude Affiliate Clinic physician Dr. Paulette Bryant served together in the U.S. Navy, both working at one point at the Naval Medical Center in Portsmouth, Virginia. Years later, after Bryant had helped build the St. Jude Affiliate Clinic in Charlotte as a pediatric hematologist/oncologist, she recruited McManaman.
“I kept telling her this was a great place to work,” Bryant said. “She said, ‘I think I want to come there.’ She was in San Diego at the time. I thought she was kidding.”
She wasn’t. Bryant, who retired last year, praised McManaman’s gentle way with patients, and the uplifting spirit she brought to a workplace whose staff must deal each day with children and illness. McManaman once won several fancy dinners in a charity raffle. She spent all of them taking colleagues to enjoy an evening together.