Joanne Wanted A N.J. Driver's License Photo, In Monmouth, Without Cancer. They Said No.

Imagine having recovered from cancer, the effects of chemotherapy long gone.

Your hair is back, it’s long and all the reminders of the disease are gone.

All except for one: The driver’s license photo, the photo that never seems to go away.

This is what Joanne Jodry faces, describing in media reports how she doesn’t want stage 2 breast to define her, and she’d like her driver’s license to reflect that.

On Thursday, she told Gannett NJ, the 53-year-old went to the Freehold office of the state Motor Vehicle Commission, wanting to renew her driver’s license and asked if she could keep her old photo with her long blond hair.

The Monmouth University professor of psychology and mother lost her hair to chemotherapy, she’s bald and has no eyelashes. She’s undergoing chemotherapy, but she expects to look very different in a few months.

Indeed, her Monmouth University photo still shows her with her hair. The MVC, however, has other ideas, as they told her so on Thursday.

“When I got there, they told me that I needed to take a new photo,” Jodry, of Neptune, told Gannett NJ.

The MVC says the computer system will not permit the use of the old photo with the new license - even though her 79-year-old mother was allowed to renew her driver’s license in Eatontown with her old photo, according to the report.

An MVC spokeswoman, said the agency must comply with state law, for security purposes. The photo on a driver’s license in New Jersey is good for two renewal cycles for a total of eight years. After that, everyone must have a new photo taken to renew their license.

When she was at the Freehold office, Jodry pleaded to the MVC workers to make an exception. She found them cold and unbending.

“I asked the manager, ’Can you accommodate for me? I have cancer. The picture is not going to look like me for ID anyway in a few months without hair,’ ” she told WABC-TV. “She said, ‘I’m making an accommodation, I’m letting you wear a scarf.’ I said I’d rather you let me use last year’s picture, and she said no.”

Jodry’s 10-year old daughter, Mary, watched her mother cry through the process of taking the picture, according to the report.

“It was upsetting to see my mother cry..when she cries I do too, but then i got mad,” Mary said in the report.

Photo, video: WABC-TV