Significant changes in our country’s healthcare system take effect today. Children with preexisting conditions won’t be denied health insurance. The lifetime cap on health insurance will be eliminated, ensuring that people with serious or expensive conditions will never be cut off.

One of these changes – part of the Obama healthcare reforms, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act- will have a huge impact on Essex resident Anna Renault.

Renault, 60, has had cancer eight times and spent around 33 years – more than half her life – with different versions of the disease. She figures she was about to reach her lifetime cap – about $1 million – and lose her health insurance before she qualified for Medicare. For her, the new law comes at exactly the right time.

“With the change that takes place, under the healthcare reform, my insurance can’t drop me,” said Renault. “I don’t have to worry about it anymore.”

“I’m 60 and I’ve earned every day of it,” said Renault, who just returned from DC, where she joined celebrations of the the legislation (see video featuring Renault interviewed by ABC in DC)

Renault spoke recently to the Brew about how she came to have such an unusually harsh experience with cancer and what the law means to her. A cheerful-and-determined lifelong Baltimore resident, Renault says one factor could be growing up close to the air and water pollution from the Bethlehem Steel (now Severstal) plant at Sparrows Point.

Her father, who worked at Beth Steel for over 31 years, died from asbestosis and bone cancers, and her mother has now developed second-hand asbestosis in one of her lungs. Renault was regularly exposed to her father’s clothes as well of those of her former husband, a plumber regularly exposed to asbestos. She is worried asbestosis “will be my next cancer.”

Still, Renault thinks her cancer is hereditary, “more than anything else.” She said seven of her father’s eight siblings died from cancer, as did her maternal grandmother. Her older sister is a ten-year breast cancer survivor and had skin cancer removed from her face a few years ago, as did her mother.

Renault, who has a 40-year-old daughter, worked as a clerk for the Maryland Division of Rehabilitation Services for over 30 years and has remained in Baltimore since retiring.

“I’m happy in Baltimore, but I’ve considered often moving not only because of Bethlehem Steel but there’s also the concern that we happen to be a (cancer) hot spot” in Baltimore, she said.

So why doesn’t she move? Because in addition to being her home, Baltimore is the source of two extremely important things in her life: the support of her family and “the great medical care here” (She has received treatment at Mercy Hospital and Franklin Square Hospital).

“Medical care in Baltimore is definitely top in the country. If you can’t find what you need here then you’re up the creek without a paddle!” she said, laughing.

Multiple cancers

Renault is currently suffering from breast cancer and over the past two years she has gone to the doctor an average of two to three times a week, though she says her chemo treatments are decreasing.

“I’m getting my strength back…Hopefully in 2011 I’ll be close to normal,” she said. In addition to breast cancer, the other cancers she has survived – some of them twice – include uterine, ovarian, colon, and skin.

Given the number of doctor visits, consultations with specialists, hospital stays and medicines that Renault has needed for decades, health insurance is a hugely important part of keeping her healthy and alive. Renault says that about 12% of her monthly retirement check goes toward her co-pay with the MD State Retiree Insurance program (Blue Cross/Blue Shield).

In addition to her general practitioner, Renault sees a lung specialist, heart specialist, valve specialist, podiatrist, and a Lupus specialist, another disease that she has. Asked how much she thinks she’s spent on medical care over the past 40 years, she said it’d be difficult to even “venture a guess.”

Renault has a memory like an elephant and can tell you the exact year of each of her diseases and other events in her life, including the summer of 1988, when she learned that in addition to cancer, she has a minor form of Lupus called, “Connective Tissue Disease, Undifferentiated” that affects her heart and kidneys.

She found out about the Lupus during a trip to Disney World, where she was initially misdiagnosed with a stroke by the resort’s medical center after becoming extremely sick from being in the sun, which is a symptom of Lupus.

“If you’re going to get sick…Disney World is the place to do it.”

Despite the Lupus he said she leads “a relatively normal life” but takes Plaquenil twice a day, as well as pain medication for her joints. Bouts of Pleurisy around four times a year that make it painful to breathe ”are probably the most annoying side-effect,” she said.

Renault is an active volunteer, raising money for cancer research and efforts to find a cure (though she said she’s not sure she believes in one.). She said she’s a huge supporter of the American Cancer Society, which provides transportation to the doctor, free wigs, and perhaps most importantly, answers “anytime you have a question.”

She had high praise for their hotline: “If your brain is going crazy in the middle of the night and you have a question [about the disease], they have an answer for you.”

Included in her long list of community work, with everyone from the Baltimore Mariners to the Raven’s Nest fundraiser, Renault volunteers at the ACS Relay for Life at Essex Community College, which she describes as “a bunch of people having a ton of fun raising money for research and direct patient services through ACS.”

She has no patience for negative attitudes about being sick or support groups where people feel sorry for themselves: “I refuse to let myself get depressed.”

When she’s not doing community work, which she says she has cut back during her chemo, she does freelance writing for the Essex newspaper, “The Avenue.” She’s responsible for writing the 500-word editorial section every week, as well as covering various local stories including candidates in the recent primary election, a local son and father who both became Catholic priests and Franklin Square Hospital’s need for more patient volunteers.

Freed of the worry about insurance coverage, Anna said, she can focus all her energies on her firm resolve to have a good life while having cancer.

“I am who I am,” she said. You’re born one day and that fact doesn’t change your entire life.”