Katie Finnegan tracked down Taylor, and Dr. Finnegan made the call.

The phone woke Taylor on Jan. 7. She was sleeping a lot at that time. It was an escape from the pain and frustration.

"Hello," she yelled into the phone, disturbed by the call.

"This is Dr. Finnegan," was the reply.

Taylor's mood changed. She apologized for her tone.

"Tell me about you," Finnegan said.

Taylor told her story. The next day her fiance, Devin Nomof, was driving her to Finnegan's office with a thick pile of medical records and test results.

Finnegan looked at results from one of 14 CT scans, and confirmed the hernia - and something else.

"I don't want to scare you," he told Taylor. "But there's something in there."

It turned out to be a benign tumor. Suddenly things made sense.

Taylor had been suffering terrible pain, which she was told shouldn't be caused by a hernia. It wasn't.

"The pain was exactly where the tumor was all along," she said.

On Jan. 31, she was at Cooper University Hospital in Camden undergoing surgery.

Finnegan performed an exploratory laparotomy, making a small incision in the abdomen to see what was causing the pain. He found a small umbilical hernia and a small tumor on the inner surface of the abdominal wall.

The tumor is unusual, but does occur in women, he said. "It can cause severe pain."

After 20 hours in the hospital, Taylor was on her way home.

"It felt like eight days," she said of the overnight stay.

When she got home, she couldn't do anything.

"Luckily, I have family and friends who love me," Taylor said.

They did everything for her: bathing her, cooking for her and cleaning - not an easy task for an admitted neat freak.

"I came over one day and her fiance said, 'Thank God you're here, I'm going to get a beer,'" longtime friend Natalie Kotte recalled.

But six weeks after surgery, Taylor was unable to sit still.

"In three days, 7 hours and 6 minutes I'm hitting the time clock at my job, and I will have my own benefits," she said Friday. "The same money, the same benefits, the same vacation days."

Taylor is a credit card associate at the local Home Depot. The corporation allows only one year of disability. While Taylor said she had been told they would likely hire her back, if she had left, she would have lost her seniority.

"I got my hair cut, I did my taxes, I am back to life," she said standing between her living room and kitchen in the home she shares with an elderly woman.

Taylor was baking brownies and lauding the doctor who she credits with saving her life.

"I made it, and I'm just happy there is a doctor out there who took his oath seriously," she said.

The surgery was covered under Charity Care, which covers the hospital bills, but not the doctor.

"I had to say, 'I'll accept no payment for this surgery,' and tell the finance people that," Finnegan said. "I asked them to relieve as much of the bill as they could. All I can do is try to be a patient advocate."

Rather than blame the doctors who didn't help Taylor, Finnegan said it's the country's health care system in general that is ailing.

"When I started doing gall bladder surgery in 1994, the reimbursement (from insurance) was somewhere around $1,800 to $2,000," he said. "Now, it's under $1,000. In some cases, it's under $600."

"That's in 14 years. Everything I know of in my life costs more," he added.

Finnegan also pointed out New Jersey's high malpractice insurance costs, which have caused many physicians to cut back their practices or leave the state.

"There isn't a doctor I know who wants to eliminate the ability for a patient's right to sue in case they're harmed," he said. "But (with malpractice) in New Jersey, the sky's the limit."

Taylor is just happy her medical nightmare of pain and insurance problems is over.

"I took, I think, everything for granted in life," she said. "I'll never do that again."

To e-mail Lynda Cohen at The Press:

LCohen@pressofac.com