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My mommy has cancer,
and she won't die.
I love the sea.
This is where my ashes will be scattered.
Patients tests are being sent out to the country to be dealt with
by a questionable entity abroad.
Two American labs are coming under scrutiny because of
faulty cancer tests in Ireland.
Hundreds of women were told they tested negative, only to
find out years later they had cancer all along.
and I shudder to think of the long-term consequences.
I suppose I have had extraordinary challenges even before the cancer diagnosis.
But I have to think that this is what has prepared me
for this fight.
My daughter Amelia was born with congenital toxoplasmosis
and will be on medication for the rest of her life.
(chatter)
Then at seven years old, Amelia had a horrific accident at home,
and suffered third-degree burns all over
her little body.
A car accident in France left me with broken bones all over my body.
My friend died,
another one of my friends was paralyzed.
It was horrendous,
it was an awful accident.
And I just thought, there can't be a god.
And I really never recovered from that from the point of
view of religion.
I just don't believe in a god I suppose.
What I do believe in is, what goes around comes around.
If you do good, you get good back in return.
And that's the way I've tried to live my life.
I will start at the beginning, back in 2014.
I was having sex with my husband and I bled,
and I thought, this isn't right.
Never happened before,
and, you know, it was really red.
And I thought, Jesus, you know, it frightened the
life out of me, to be honest.
And actually, while I was having the smear
the nurse even, you know, kind of made a face.
I knew by looking at her that she knew this wasn't right
because, again, when she did
the smear and took the sample, I bled.
So she said to me at that stage, "Hmm... I don't like the
look of that now, Vicky."
she said I'm going to send it off and mark it urgent.
So my GP rang me anyway and told me the results were back.
And she said that they were very high grade.
She said what happens now, Vicky, is I've sent an urgent referral
for you said to have a colposcopy done.
I got the call...
two days later, on Thursday 17th of July,
which is ingrained in my brain forever.
And basically, he told me, "I'm sorry, Vicky
but you have cancer."
I had a cervical smear test done in 2011,
and my test results were wrongly reported as normal.
In 2014, I developed cervical cancer.
I went through an aggressive regime of chemotherapy and radiation,
and was eventually told that there was no evidence
of disease in my body.
In November 2017, I was told that my cancer was back.
She rang me and she said, "Susan, they found something."
She said, "I'm going to go to the hospital,
and would you meet me me for lunch?"
I said no way. I said you're coming up.
You're coming up the night before,
and we are going together.
You know? And she said, I don't want to tell anybody,
it's so close to Christmas. I said, "Fine.
We'll go together."
And I sat in that place where I sat with her...
a couple of years previous.
And what was killing me, they recognized her.
I'll never forget that day, like...
I went in there on my own, and she said to me...
she said, "Okay, Vicky, look, unfortunately
you know, your cancer is back."
Obviously, she said, but it's far worse than, you know...
than we thought.
And I said, but you told me in December, I said, when I
spoke to you on the phone that, you know, you'd be
talking to me now with a treatment plan and she said,
"Well, yeah
She said, but I wasn't going to give you this news over
the phone, you know? So that's why I wanted to bring you in.
And I said, I mean, I was just so shocked, to be honest
I said well, how bad?
How bad is this?
and she said... "You've got a ten-centimeter tumor."
I said, "What?!"
So I said, what are you telling me then?
I said, there must be something that you can do for me
And she said, "Chemotherapy.
That's it."
I said, and are we talking about chemotherapy now...
I said, "Is there a chance?
What are my odds?" Basically.
"Is this still something that I can,
you know, survive?"
And she said, "No."
And I said,
"Palliative, are you talking about palliative care?"
And she said, "Yeah."
Palliative chemotherapy was not an option for me.
I wanted more.
At 43, I was told to go home and get my affairs in order.
She said, "You have 6 to 12 months to live."
and when she said 6 to 12 months, she clarified,
if I took took the treatment, I'd have 12 months.
If I refused or didn't go on the palliative chemotherapy,
I'd be dead in six.
So I went into this bathroom and I just cried my eyes out
for like 20 minutes.
I just had to get it out
got it out, pulled myself together,
splashed some water, thank God, had no makeup on,
or the mascara would have been running everywhere.
But I remember going back out to my mother and Amelia in the
waiting room and... Mam knew, Mam knew.
She just looked at my face,
and I just looked at her and I just went...
shook my head like that.
I said, "Come on, let's go."
So we just kind of chit chatted, you know,
in the car on the way home with Amelia in the back,
and sent her up to our room or something when we got home.
I just told Mam then. And sure... God it was just...
Oh I will never forget it,
It was horrendous, it was worse than telling her the first time,
to be honest, you know?
because at that point I really didn't know what to do, you know?
Because first time round,
when you're told you've got cancer, you trust...
you trust that they know what they're doing,
and everything is going to be okay.
But then I knew, that day I knew. I just thought, "Here I am,
you know, less than four years later with a ten-centimeter tumor,
worse than before."
For me, it was that day that I decided
I'm taking back control of this.
And that was the day I went and started
researching everything.
So this is my medical file.
This is when I got all the information back from
copies from my solicitor that he got and then the one I requested
myself from the hospital.
So there's various pieces in here. And then here,
the one that started it all off, actually.
That's right here.
So I was having a biopsy done and basically,
I was bored. So I started looking through my file,
and found this.
So this is a prior smear.
Before I was diagnosed the 24th of May 2011, my son was
barely four months old and the original result was NAD,
which means no abnormality detected.
And then when they reviewed it on the audit, it says,
"Query squamous cell carcinoma."
Squamous cell carcinoma is cancer, like it's cancer.
It's not pre-cancer.
It's not CIN1, CIN2, CIN3, It's cancer.
And the minute I saw that, I just said to my mother,
"You know, Mam, you know, I had cancer in 2011."
I couldn't believe this.
And I kept reading it and rereading it.
But down here I work in administration,
you know, in education.
I've done plenty mail mergers in my life to know
two of two means, page two of two.
So I knew there was a page missing,
so I was going through my file, going, "Where's this page one?"
You know?
And my mother said, "Sure, it's probably just a cover page."
And I said, "Yeah, but why is it missing?
And who is it to and when?"
And that was when I realised I need help with this,
and two weeks later I was in Cian O'Carroll's office in Cashel.
Normally, American screening is done using
a combination of automated screening and a manual review.
So automated screening involves a computer-assisted process and...
something akin to face recognition software is used to
identify through a microscope with a computer looking at it,
identify 22 fields of view which are then presented to the
screener to see are there abnormalities present?
If there are no abnormalities present, then the
entire slide is subjected to a manual review,
where eye to microscope eyepiece, the laboratory scientist,
or cytotechnologist, screens the entire slide quickly over the course
of 90 seconds.
It can take longer, but it's supposed to take at
least 90 seconds.
That process costs more,
and I understand it costs significantly more.
For one-third of the price that it would cost in Ireland.
Not a third less, one-third of the price.
In Vicky's case,
I put the slide under the microscope, and it's almost like
the cells are crying out to say, "Here I am abnormal."
If you can see the cells at a low power, then, you know,
nobody should be really missing them.
And that was what I discovered in that one particular slide.
They were plentiful.
And if one were to take a photograph of that,
then you would say it looked like a map with lots of dots on it.
where the dot is against an abnormal group.
So there were so many here
that I had to use the word plentiful
in Vicky's case.
# (music)
I had an appointment two weeks later,
with the medical oncologist,
and he explained it all,
and told me I'd be on chemotherapy for five months,
and it was three different types of drugs,
and the side effects were worse than what I had had
first time around.
I'd lose my hair. Never lost my hair the first time around.
And, you know, people I think women understand this
some people would say, what's the big deal?
It's only hair. But for a woman,
hair is a big thing, you know?
And a little boy, he was three and he loved my hair.
And I said, I'm not losing this fucking hair.
I'm just not.
Okay, so let me just recap here.
I said I'd be on chemotherapy for five months,
and I'm going to be horrendously sick.
I'm going to lose all my hair.
I said, and I'll have no quality of life for five months.
So when I get over the effects,
and because I'd done it once before, I knew how long it took.
It took me about three months, the last time to get
over the effects.
I said, then, really, I've got six months.
I said, I'm not gaining anything here.
If I don't take your treatment,
I'm actually feeling good at the moment,
Ive 6 months anyway,
you know?
And he said, "Yes, but you know, if you're on no treatment,
that tumor is going to keep growing.
And I said yes,
I said I know that.
But that's why I'm asking you about alternative options.
Now the clock was ticking.
I had six months to live, and I was on my own.
I had to research treatments myself to help me stay alive.
You have all of these people trying to get on to clinical trials
and all these scientists looking to get people
for clinical trials. Yeah.
So it was easy enough, was it?
It can be easy.
The problem is they only take small numbers on these trials.
The particular trial I'm looking at..
I mean, I am looking at a lot of trials,
because I can't put all my eggs in one basket.
But the particular trial I'm looking at only takes one
patient per month.
You know, and I've been told by the nurse
I'm in touch with over there that it'll be several months.
Peter got in touch with me after his mum heard me on the Ray Darcy show
because I had been campaigning to get on to a clinical trial
that I had researched myself over in Maryland, in the States.
And Peter, his wife, had actually been on the very
same trial that I was trying to get onto.
This photo was taken on the 1st of June 2016,
and was three days after Jessica's communion.
So that's Jessica there, and we were over in the park.
It was a lovely sunny day, but the next day, Thursday,
the 2nd of June, Emma started her chemotherapy
in St James' Hospital.
So she had beautiful... she had a mane of hair, beautiful,
beautiful hair.
She knew what was going to get shaved.
So she said, I better get a family photo.
But it was the last family photo, family...
yeah, photo that we ever got done.
And they told me it would take about four weeks because they
have to grow this culture, you know, bloods or whatever.
And was waiting and waiting and waiting.
And at that point when what month were we? That was about March.
It was March when we found out and I was starting to get
really ill at that point.
I was in bed a lot, and in a lot of pain.
And I remember getting the email,
and I was actually lying in bed.
And I remember...
I don't think I even finished the email...
and I started....
hegging them, you know, that kind of way?
You just crying and you can't stop.
Thank God the kids were in school, and Jim came upstairs.
just to check on me, 'cause I wasn't well that day.
I was really feeling unwell and he came in and saw me,
obviously, and I'm quite a strong person.
I don't cry too often, but I really couldn't stop.
And he came in and he knew, because we were waiting,
you know, he knew we were waiting for this result.
And he just looked at me.
He said, "Oh, God."
I said, "Yeah, that's it.
We're out. That's it.
You know, I'm not eligible for the trial."
And he just collapsed, collapsed onto his knees.
And we were there for about an hour.
I didn't know what to do, you know?
And he said, "What are we going to do now, Vicky?" and I said,
"I don't know."
That was it, the last kind of hope. Last blow. Yeah.
The last hope of getting onto one.
We didn't know much about pembrolizumab
in this county at that stage.
We thought we had to go to America. Yeah. Yeah.
That day was... oh God, I'll never forget it.
Thank god the kids were in school,
weren't they?
If you were successful in the initial part of the trial,
they looked at giving you a PD-L1 inhibitor,
a pembrolizumab drug.
And so that was probably the first time I kind of had
come across it.
And then I investigated all sorts of other types
of immunotherapy drugs.
But pembrolizumab was coming out strong.
Peter mentioned that it was a drug that may work for me.
So pembrolizumab was one part of the clinical trial
that I wasn't eligible for in Maryland.
I started looking at pembrolizumab and realised,
"Well, Merck, Sharp and Daum are the company who make this drug.
They're based in Ireland.
Surely people in Ireland...
there must be people in Ireland on this."
That's when I started looking at that as an option.
I was just very lucky that my neighbor knows somebody who
works very high up in Merck, not in Oncology,
in a different area.
But he got me on to somebody who does work there, got their
contact details, and I bombard them and started asking,
"How do I get onto this drug?"
She had come with the results of the PD-L1 assay,
which suggested that she might benefit from this drug.
So I had discussed it with her.
We had looked at ways of getting her the drug initially
on study, and she, through her own research, had sought out
options where that might be available.
It didn't look like there was a study option open to her.
So I went then...
I went into looking as to how I might get the drug for her.
If you have a situation where a plaintiff has a very limited
life expectancy, well, then there is a system in place
where you can inform the court of that,
and you get priority treatment.
And the court system works extremely well, particularly in
those urgent cases.
The week before the hearing, we had a mediation hearing.
Okay, so this was on the 9th of April.
You've got these three rooms. Okay?
So it's like a negotiation.
So we were in one room with my two solicitors,
and our two barristers.
Then there was another room because I was suing
both the HSE and the lab
So the HSE and all their solicitors and barristers were
in another room. And then there was the labs,
solicitors and barristers in another room,
and then there was this mediator going in
between the three trying to, you know, find some way
to settle this.
So basically, this was the first attempt that they made
to gag me. Okay. So I was ill. I was in pain.
I mean, at that stage, I was going round...
Cian was laughing at me.
I was going with this hot water bottle, you know,
I was eating painkillers.
And I had this hot water bottle constantly on my back for
the pain, you know? And I wouldn't be able to sit for long,
so I'd sit for a while and then I'd have to kind of either lie off or,
you know, and we were there for probably about 4 hours
and we were already after traveling on the train to get there.
And it was uncomfortable.
So, you know, I was really, really ill and they knew this.
There was bit of negotiation going on.
And I remember going in that morning, Cian came down,
and he said, "Look, they will offer you a settlement, but it
is conditional on you signing a non-disclosure agreement."
And straightaway I said, "Absolutely not."
And he said, "Are you sure about that?"
And I said, "Absolutely."
I don't even have to think about it.
When Vicky approached us, she had a sense that there were
other people involved.
We later got documentation which gave us an idea that
there were 15 people involved in one batch from this review.
And that gave us a sense that there were other batches from
perhaps other geographic regions within the country and
maybe even other years or other periods from the review.
But we didn't know how many were involved at that stage.
But from the very first meeting, yeah, Vicky made
it absolutely clear that there would be no
agreements to confidentiality.
I knew at that point there were other women that were in the
same boat as me who were clueless.
Out there at home not knowing this was going on.
And I thought I could not I just couldn't, you know,
stand over that.
# (music)
So to think that, you know, the following week I'd have to
go up and stand and, you know, give evidence
in a trial.
I mean, I never really thought it would get to that point.
So I was progressively getting worse even in that week,
and the following Monday.
And at that stage, you know, I still
hadn't started treatment.
You know, I was still waiting to get the go... the green light,
the go-ahead to start on this immunotherapy drug.
It was the hospital weren't willing to sign off on me
starting on this drug because I was risk it's all risk
risk assessment, risk insurance.
And I said, "I'll sign anything."
I said, "I'll sign whatever they want."
I said, "I won't even bloody well read it."
I said, "I don't have an option at the moment.
If I don't go on this drug, I'm dead.
That's it."
So, you know, when he pushed it then with the the CEO of
the hospital, they eventually gave in and on the
Monday I started.
So the Monday was the 16th of April.
And I was up on that stand that Thursday, 19th of April.
And I'm telling you, at that Monday,
when I got the first infusion of the drug,
I had such a severe reaction to it.
You know, we put in a night from hell at home.
It was like the worst kind of one of the worst days
of chemo. It was like that.
It was literally my body was rejecting this drug.
Jim said to me, you can't go to court on Thursday.
You just can't.
He said, look at you.
He said that you can't even get out of the bloody chair.
And on Tuesday I said, "Yeah, no, I think you're right."
And I rang Cian and I said, "Look, I'm just... I'm I can't."
And I suppose, what drove me was,
I thought its one day I only have to do this for one day,
I don't have to go back up again.
And that's what he said to me,
"It's only one day Vicky if you can just come up..."
He said, "You know, we can put you up, do whatever we have to,
take loads of breaks."
He said, "It's one day if you can just, you know, do it."
By the time we got to the trial,
she was a very sick woman.
It was obvious that she was in a huge amount of pain.
Her mobility was profoundly affected by that,
and she was just battling through it.
On the Wednesday, felt a bit better, and I thought maybe.
So I rang Cian, and I said,
"Look, I'm not going to say anything to Jim."
I said, "But book us into a hotel.
I said, "I'm coming up there tomorrow.
That's it."
What they are trying to determine, he said,
all the way through this case, is the amount.
"It's all about money," he said,
"at the end of the day is how much your dying is going to
cost them and what the impact is."
So he said, "You've got two young children. So the way that
they might go about this, he said,
is about your child care arrangements.
When you go, who's going to mind your children?
You know, if your husband's at work?
You know, Amelia was nearly 13, so they really were
only responsible for her up until 18.
So they only had five years really to kind of calculate on
what they needed to pay out for her.
Then Darragh was much younger.
Well, Vicky was her case.
She communicated her experience through this
so brilliantly, and the everybody in the courtroom was
affected by it.
I remember my best friend
She's an awful softy anyway, she's a nurse.
She would cry now at the drop of a hat.
(sniffles) All I could hear was this, you know.
You know what the worst part of it was?
Thank God I couldn't see them because,
the stenographer who was sitting across from me,
that was bad enough.
She was typing and the tears were rolling down her face.
And I was trying to look away.
And at the end, she said to me, I remember when
we were finished.
She put her hand across the table she said,
"Vicky I'm so sorry," she said, "for getting upset."
She said, "I know it's not professional," but she said,
"I couldn't help myself."
You know, oh the tears were streaming down her face,
and I was there trying not to look at her, you know,
and look anywhere
But I kind of picked a point across kind of over her head
because I couldn't really focus unless I was, you know,
blocked it all out, really, to be able to answer the questions
From a litigation point of view,
you do need certain things.
You need certain assets or strengths with your clients.
And and she had them all and in spades.
She was very sick as to do with the cancer itself, tumours.
They were very advanced, very large.
And they were creating just internal anatomical problems.
And that was the sickness that was there.
She also had a confirmation that week to plan,
and to work through.
Sorry.
Sorry about that.
Just give us a second.
I'll take a cup of coffee.
I think I was most affected by the fact that she had to go
into the witness box in court and to talk about really
intimate things like her sex life.
And this is not an acceptable way, human way,
a civilized way of dealing with episodes of failure of clinical
systems in some way or other, whether they're...
whether there's an intrinsic error in the system.
It doesn't matter whether it's negligence.
It doesn't matter.
This is no way of dealing with things.
Vicky Phelan had a smear test in 2011 under the National
CervicalCheck Screening Programme.
It was wrongly reported as clear.
There are no winners here today.
I am terminally ill and there is no cure for my cancer.
My settlement will mostly be spent on buying me time,
and on paying for clinical trials to keep me alive,
and to allow me to spend more time with my children.
If I die, and I truly hope that won't be the case,
the money would provide for my family.
The conduct of CervicalCheck and the HSE in my
case is unforgivable.
To know for almost three years
that a mistake had been made and that I was
misdiagnosed is bad enough.
But to keep that information from
me until I became
terminally ill and to drag me through the courts to fight for
my right to the truth is an appalling breach of trust.
And I truly hope that some good will come of this case.
and that there will be an investigation
into the CervicalCheck program as a result of this.
Oh my God. When I saw the number this morning,
I really know I could have dropped.
We knew that there were at least 14 other women and we
kind of surmised that there were more than that,
to be honest.
But I really didn't think there would be more than 40 or 50,
you know, nationally.
First thing that they put on the table ever, before,
you know, kind of looking at money or, you know, trying to
settle this, you know, in a normal way, as I would think
was a confidentiality clause.
That's what straight away that was what they were
looking for.
And I mean... So you'd go home, back down to Annacotty and keep
your mouth shut.
Keep your mouth shut and we'll pay you off.
Yeah, basically.
Now, if you had agreed to that,
Mm-hmm. the country wouldn't know
the extent of this controversy. Absolutely not.
We would know that there are 206 women in a similar
situation to you.
We've just got news in now
that Professor Grainne Flannelly who's the director
of CervicalCheck, has informed the HSE of her intention to
stand aside as clinical director of the services.
(applause)
I just want to say how saddened I was to hear
about the case of Vicky Phelan,
and the extent to which I feel for her and her family.
And I am very angry on behalf of the 160 or so women who were
not told of the results of the audit.
And I know this country is a country that hasn't always
treated women very well and in the past, and even today perhaps,
treats them very badly.
That's why I'm determined to get to the bottom of this.
Information was deliberately withheld from women and
from their families.
That's the issue here.
Can you answer also my question as regards Mr.
Tony O'Brien, Head of the HSE?
Do you have confidence in him Taoiseach?
Because I certainly don't.
Will you do the thing that is glaringly apparent that you
need to do?
Will you relieve from of his duties?
The decision to outsource these tests to the USA in 2008
somehow cost lives?
I explained why that is not yet supported by the facts,
and I think everyone, even Tony O'Brien, deserves
a fair hearing before they are condemned.
Let's have an investigation.
Let's see what happened.
Where is the accountability?
Why don't we both wait?
Why don't we both wait until the outcome of the expert review?
And then you can reflect and I can reflect.
At the moment you are causing hysteria.
Mr O'Brien also told the committee that while he learned about the
case of Vicky Phelan on RTE news, he was told in a
briefing note in 2016 that a communications process was
about to begin to notify patients with cancer about an
audit of their smear tests.
Those 2016 memos seen by Tony O'Brien,
they're very revealing.
They say CervicalCheck knew cancer cases had been missed.
It said that over 1,200 cases of cervical cancer have been
notified to the service and it was reviewing 315.
It was about to start telling the treating doctors, but was
warning of the risk of patients contacting the media.
So I suppose, you know, like any mother, I still have
the normal day to day stuff to do.
And to be honest, I'm struggling most of the time to keep up.
So I just do the bare necessities now to be honest.
to be honest.
But I try to keep it as normal as possible because, you know,
I know the kids are very conscious of...
they know what I'm like when I'm sick.
Only my family and my friends knew I had cancer in 2014.
This time the whole bloody country knew.
You know, and it was all over the papers.
So I was kind of trying to keep ahead of that the whole time.
I mean, I'd never told the kids it was terminal In January when
I was diagnosed, I just told them the cancer was back.
They knew that. It kind of got away from me, really, you know?
Before I got to tell Darragh,
somebody in the schoolyard said it to him.
One of the boys in his class just said to him,
is your mammy going to die?
So, you know, that's very hard when you have to sit down your
seven year old and tell them,
"Well, what do you think, Darragh?"
And at that stage I was actually quite ill.
So he actually said that to me.
He said, "Well, you're very sick, Mam."
And I said, "Yeah, I am."
I said, "But you know..." This was just before I started on
the immunotherapy drug.
I said, "If I start on this immunotherapy drug, I said,
you know, I'll have a chance."
I said, "You know, I'll be okay."
And I did it in terms the way I the only way I could describe it,
and Jesus, this was a totally off the cuff on the day...
Star Wars.
That just came into my head. Star Wars.
I was trying to explain how immunotherapy drugs worked.
And I said, it's like the tie fighters in Star Wars,
you know, I said they're shooting.
I said to try and, you know, kill the other jets.
I said, that's basically what's happening in my body.
This is the ward where I come to have my treatment.
Just show you...
And you come out here.
So you just come in these doors here.
So you're coming into St Anne's Day Centre.
So...
I'm just waiting here to get my infusion,
so my hand is prepped and ready to go.
I've brought my kids in first time and just when I was
having radiation, but they were just in the waiting room.
But they're always curious as to what happens, you know?
So this is the pembrolizumab now going up.
So that's for 30 minutes. Okay. So that's it's starting to go in.
Okay. Brilliant, thank you.
# (music)
So that it,
it's in.
The HSE serious incident management team said most women
or families affected would be contacted today or
by tomorrow.
There have been 17 deaths confirmed
amongst that cohort.
As you probably have heard,
today is going to be my last day
as director general of the HSE.
Where's Oscar? Back there.
Do you want to go get him? No.
No? No.
Which one can I have? Two of them.
I can have the two of them?
What happened your eye?
I moved my eyeball.
It wasn't until the 14th of July 2017 when they actually
sat us down and said, "We're stopping all treatment.
This cancer's too progressive." Were we told that this is terminal.
That was the very first time that we knew that this
battle was over.
So our oldest boy, Oscar, hadn't started school yet.
So Irene straight away, target in her head.
I just want to see Oscar start school.
This is all I want to live for.
A week and a half later, Irene passed away,
so we didn't even get our few short weeks.
When Irene passed away,
any time I heard anything on the news
about cancer, or online,
or anything cancer-related, I just turned it off,
and walked away done that journey, lost out bad to it.
I don't want to know anything about it,
so I don't know anything about Vicky's court case on the Wednesday.
I had ignored it, and a couple of days after it,
on the Saturday night, Vicky was on the Ray Darcy show,
I ignored that. Sunday then, it just completely snowballed,
that interview that Vicky did with Ray, and just clips of her
interviews popping up everywhere in social media
and I was just ignoring, ignoring, ignoring all
that Sunday morning.
And by afternoon, it got to a stage where, alright,
well actually I have to see what this is about,
because there's no getting away from it now.
Later on Sunday then, the news was that 17 women
had died before they got the audit results.
And that was the first time for me that now I got interested in
the story because smear tests, cervical cancer,
but now people are dead.
Monday the HSE announced that they're going to contact
everybody that is involved in this or all of the women,
and they're going to contact the next of kin of the 17 women
that had passed away.
So now I'm waiting by the phone.
And the following day then,
and I'm up in my office in Tallaght,
em...
and I got a call from the HSE to say that Irene's name
came up in the most recent audit, and that was the first time
that we got confirmation that Irene was in it.
I just turned to the lady on the phone,
"Is she one of the 17 women?"
And she's like, "Yes, she is."
And I asked what are these smears in relation to?
And she was like 2010 and 2013.
I was like, "2010. There's two of them?"
She's like, "No, no, no, sorry, I can't answer
these questions. I'm not a clinical advisor."
Basically, I could have been one of the women like Irene,
Stephen's wife,
who wasn't given the chance to find out,
and who wasn't given the chance to fight.
And Stephen is here on her behalf.
At least I'm still here to tell the tale.
And that's why I'm fighting with everything within
my being, not only to live,
but to get to the bottom of this.
I'm here representing my late wife, Irene, who died July,
last year at the age of 35.
And I'm going to begin just two weeks to go, just over two
weeks ago when the HSE first contacted me.
Both these smear tests that Irene was led to believe
both came back clear.
And the 2010 said call back in three years,
the 2013 said call back 3 to 5 years time.
when these were all audited,
it turns out that the 2010 had precancerous cells in it,
and that was the results from the audit, to which I asked what
would have this triggered if she actually got these results day one?
They would have brought her back in,
and they would have done a physical examination.
They would have performed the procedure,
what they were burned the way to cells,
and chances are that was it then go live the rest of your life.
Nothing was offered.
No support services, nothing for...
me to help my kids through their bereavement.
Oscar was four when his mum died and Noah was two,
they are five and three today.
I had to inform Irene's GP that she was one of the 17 women
who were audited.
I had to inform Irene's GP about the results of the audit.
From what it looks like, information was clearly
withheld now from the ministers.
We have to take them at their word
that they did not receive this information.
But it seems to be that the people in these senior
positions that knew about all of these memos in 2016
are the same people that are in senior positions today,
and that need to be questioned when it comes to these inquiries.
And they are clearly and obviously sitting on this
information preventing us to get as and this drip,
drip feed that you guys seem to be getting in these committee
meetings. It's clear, it's obvious that this is going on.
Who approved this communications strategy,
and who decided that it was okay,
not only not to tell the clinicians,
but not to tell the patients.
You know?
And why were the HSE more worried about being sued by the labs,
you know? such as quest than communications information
on incorrect or misread smears to patients?
This is not just a woman issue.
This is affecting men and children
who are without their mothers and their wives.
I never want to see this happen again.
And if I do die, I want it to be not in vain.
And I want to make sure that there are protocols
put in place, sanctions for people who are not accountable,
who make these mistakes and are held accountable,
and that the HSE is overhauled,
and I mean, overhauled, you know, from the ground up.
So that...
people are held accountable and that this will never happen
again in any shape or form.
It's certainly one of the biggest medical scandals,
but there would be pretty intense competition from
our health service.
Of course,
what do they all have in common ?
Women's health.
And we don't seem to be able to do women's health very
well here, particularly anything to do
with the area of reproduction.
# (music)
That was really hard to hear.
Really hard to hear.
Just, you know, actually, it isn't fate that brought
you to where you are today, Lorraine.
It's somebody that messed up.
And meant that you didn't get treated a year earlier than you
should have been, which has completely changed your life.
This is actually the review, the audit.
And it says here that the smear test on the 23rd of June 2011,
the original report was reported as LSIL which is
low-grade squamous lesion, repeat smear test in
six months, and then the final review option.
It went from the lowest to the highest.
High grade squamous.
I can't even pronounce that... lesion.
The big thing for us was would we be able to have children?
That's that's was my big thing from the beginning.
I didn't care I had cancer.
All I wanted to know was will we be able to have children?
I... I found it emotionally harder than anything.
Physically, physically, I could do surgeries.
I became a pro at surgeries.
I really did.
But emotionally, it nearly broke me.
I remember my friend being home from New Zealand,
and she had a baby, and my other two friends had their babies close before
that and there were all meeting up, and I just couldn't go.
Because I knew that...
you know, that wasn't going to happen for me.
So we came to terms slowly but surely with the fact that
we weren't going to have a family.
And and that was a long process.
I sent some of my colleagues to the United States,
including a medical consultant who was very experienced in quality
assurance of laboratory services and screening services.
And they visited the labs and looked at the current system.
A major part of it was to make sure that the... the quality
assurance in the labs was good at the moment.
And then they asked questions about, historically,
what had been happening in those labs.
And my colleagues asked some quite blunt questions.
And they eventually got really surprising answers about how
slides were sent to other laboratories,
from Florida to Honolulu.
Slides are usually read by two people, two different people,
and so they're double read.
And that's in order to try and reduce the...
the possibility of error.
And they'd be read in one place for the first reading,
and then another place for the second reading.
Now the slides are quite robust and unlikely to be damaged,
or influenced by being moved around like this.
But this really didn't sound to us at all like good practice,
particularly since we couldn't find any record of
CervicalCheck back in Ireland ever having been told that this
was happening, that they were going out to other companies
and also that some of these labs no longer existed.
So we couldn't really....
check them out because they weren't there anymore.
Dr. Scally, can they ask you that, given the information was
apparently hidden from you as it relates to locations,
for example, 16, not six laboratories?
Does that information hidden from you include the HSE hiding it?
The news of the additional report is came as much a shock to the
staff of CervicalCheck and HSE as they did to me.
But I think if you go back to the women and families here,
they want a number of things.
One, they want the truth of what happened.
The number of women had this information withheld
from them.
So, you know, they have lost confidence.
They have lost trust in the medical system.
And they want an apology for that.
And I want an apology for that.
I want somebody in this country that is authorised by the state
of the country to say,
"I am sorry for what happened to you."
Vicky had her smear done in CPL,
and Lorraine had her smears done CPL,
Irene had her first first smear got done in CPL,
I just couldn't believe it.
And then you go on to learn that, you know,
like cervical check didn't have a clue
It was just mind blowing.
The fact that CPL couldn't answer
where how many smears went to where.
People don't realize that actually, you know,
you're not able to come to the press conference today because
you were vomiting.
This seems to be a pattern that I've developing,
isn't it, Lorraine?
So the last Scally report, I couldn't go to either.
So Stephen and Lorraine went.
But actually I really wanted to go to be fair.
We nearly had to talk you out of it.
I know you did, actually.
Only for I vomited on the way out of the hospital,
I probably would have I think.
I would have said to the taxi driver, "Ah go on,
bring me over to Buswells."
I felt fine until I started to move around,
and I then started vomiting, anyway the reason I couldn't go
was because I had a procedure done.
My veins are shot I got a portocath in.
The last time any laboratory was visited was in 2014,
and at the conclusion of each of those visits,
serious concerns were raised, and then not followed up,
by the National Screening Service and by CervicalCheck.
I think there you are telling those laboratories
that they can do what they want.
You are handing over all of the responsibility
for checks and balances to the very company that
has a vested financial interest in doing this job quickly,
doing it cheaply and maximizing profits.
So this is just the new update of it?
Is that gone to press? It's going shortly.
We just need to approve it.
This group of Vicky, Loraine and Stephen.
They've emerged and they've, you know, at considerable
personal cost to themselves,
I think... put so much effort into making things better.
So much effort.
It's deeply, deeply impressive.
I see similarities between what has happened in the church,
to what is now happening with the medical profession in this country.
The medical profession in this country have had
a hold on the way things have happened.
So just because Scally's report is going to come out now,
that doesn't mean that these recommendations are actually
going to be implemented, because that's not what happens
in this country, and that's what I'm challenging.
I want to see real change happening in this country where
we're not just, you know, what would you call that?
You know...
Doing these reports, doing these HiQA investigations
and then, you know, the report kind of gathers dust and
nothing happens and then we just wait for the next
scandal to come.
And that's the that's the pattern.
But when we read it and we saw 50 recommendations,
that'll instantly improve the program immediately, like,
we were blown away by that,
because we did not expect that at all.
The HSE, this monolith with 150,000 employees,
no board overseeing anything,
so that is already on the cards to be introduced.
But what Scally has said that he's recommending is,
not only a board to oversee the HSE,
he's talking about boards to oversee individual programmes
within the screening programmes so that
the CervicalCheck programme will be overseen by a board.
The CT and MRI department.
So...
# (music)
let's go and find out.
Fingers crossed,
the result of this would be good.
Fingers crossed.
Some of you already know, I had a scan yesterday,
we got the results today, I know I'm emotional,
it's but in a good way.
There a significant shrinkage of my tumours.
(cheering and applause)
Enjoy the free bar, they are the best band in the fucking world.
(laughter, cheering and applause)
Are you comfortable with where we're at now at this stage,
since Gabriel undertook his report? I am, though I think
there's obviously no room for complacency. Mm-hmm.
I think it's good that what he said today.
Is that most of the actions are on track,
he said that the people are very committed to it.
And I think it's really important, though,
that the man who put in place the recommendations is coming
back in check and everyone's doing it.
So he's going to come back again in May with another report
and then every six months thereafter,
we're going to keep on publishing it.
We've obviously a lot to do.
Open disclosure.
We need to change the law this year.
I know you've been passionate about that.
So the patient safety bill and I go back to government on that
in the next couple of months and we get that
passed this year.
People don't want to talk about the bottom half of their body,
you know? It's sad and I think it goes back to being Irish.
We're very kind of... you know. Being oppressed.
Oppressed and ashamed about talking.
And that's why I was I made the decision fairly early on.
I was going to talk about it because I thought, well,
if I do, other people might think,
"Well, I'm not on my own here.
I'm having the same problems, you know,
because the whole kind of intimate
relationship and with any type of gyny cancer, you know
up to 50 percent of marriages break down
with a gyny cancer diagnosis. Yeah.
So, I mean, it's huge, you know.
So there's definitely stuff that we can do for... for women
with cervical cancer in general as well.
And I took that away from that.
So we're going to set up a we're going to set up a group
to look at the whole issue of fertility and IVF.
Lymphedema is another issue that came up.
And that was something I wasn't...
because I suppose I don't have that, you know.
But I realised there was a lot
of women in the group who did.
But actually the emotional side.
There's nobody you know... there's no support there for that.
# (music)
We are trying to push this through to get access to
Pembrolizumab for all women with advanced cervical cancer,
or stage four cervical cancer,
because cervical cancer is not curable.
It affects primarily young women.
And, you know, two ladies that I had campaigning
yesterday with me for this.
Who are trying to get access to this. One of them is 33, Tracey,
and she has a three year old child. Aine Morgan,
the other lady who was sitting beside me yesterday,
is from Loughrea in Galway,
and she's like, my age, actually, she's 44.
Morally, I could not accept that this drug was being made
available to me and meanwhile, these two women sitting.
beside me are not
being able to access it unless they pay for it.
Obviously the story broke at the time,
and the HSE decided to pay for it for her.
With the way this story developed,
we ended up in a very inequitable situation because we had
a group of women who could be treated with pembrolizumab
if they had been on the screening program.
And yet we had a group of women with the same disease who
weren't on the screening program, who couldn't get the drug.
And that clearly is is not right.
You either deny to everyone, or you are you allow everyone.
Vicky did a huge amount of research and has found that there is a drug
that she's taking that she wants other women
in the similar situation to have.
And, you know, given the mistakes that have been made,
given the, you know, the undervaluing of women's health in our system,
I hope she succeeds in her campaign.
(chatter)
We would still encourage people to go for their smears,
and to continue going to their doctor,
particularly if you have symptoms.
And I know the children here in the audience, so I won't start
talking too much about vaginas.
But, you know... (laughter)
..at the same time, you know, we have to
normalize the conversations about these type of
cancers because, you know, not everybody is going to get
the nice cancer, you know, breast cancer is...
you know, people like breasts,
and they're okay to talk about.
But nobody talks about their vaginas or their penises,
do you know what I mean? (laughter)
But at the end of the day, we all have them.
And, you know, this is why I am as graphic, and as open,
and talking about this as I can, because I'm very acutely aware
that there are young girls and young boys here today,
who are hopefully going to have the HPV vaccine
and that we'll be looking at a situation in 40 to 50 years
time where we will not have cervical cancer.
I also saw the report today that she was at
the Young Scientist Exhibition, if you like, on the positive side.
And I gather there were a number of the exhibits
to do with cervical cancer.
That is wonderful.
Well, we asked about... here.
If you had a 13 year old daughter.
11 to 13? Yeah.
Would you allow her to get it? Still... 25 percent said no.
If it wasn't for Vicky, myself and Lorraine shouting from the rooftops
to people to keep going, getting their smears done,
that we want to find out everything that was wrong.
What's going wrong with the system,
and exposing the truth so it can be fixed.
God only knows where we be today.
We're really lucky that the cervical screening program will
be shifting to a much more reliable process of
HPV testing, virus testing, the cells which will remove that
human error element.
The most important thing I did this week was signing the
consent form for Amelia to have the HPV vaccine.
And this vaccine wasn't around when I was old enough to have it.
So, you know, it's a big thing for me really to be able to sign
the consent form for my own daughter.
The second reason is so important is because I didn't
think I'd be here to sign it.
You know, that's a biggie for me, you know?
Because I knew it would come when she was starting
secondary school, and back in January,
I didn't know if I would be here.
So it really meant that to be here, to do that myself.
Oh, my God.
Fabulous.
She's also been campaigning with all her efforts to make
sure nothing like this ever happens again.
Please be upstanding for our very special recognition Woman
of the year, Vicky Phelan. (applause)
I didn't choose this public person I have become.
I was quite happy being anonymous.
And, you know, a mammy at home.
What drives me to continue campaigning is my 13 year
old daughter, Amelia.
I never want to see this happen to her.
I never want to see it happen to another woman in Ireland.
And I will continue campaigning until we have a screening
program that we can trust.
# (music)
I've just been at the anniversary mass of a Emma Kearns.
Peter reached out to me less than six weeks after
his wife died.
I got onto the drug that I'm on, pembrolizumab,
and Emma had been on that drug, too.
It was the last drug she was on.
She had had two doses just before she died.
Peter mentioned that this was a drug that may work for me.
I was sitting there thinking,
Well, I have this woman to thank for my life.
So, I mean, that's a big one.
So thank you, Emma.
Thank you.
Their lawyers said the case had been extremely
traumatic for Mrs Morrissey.
She was told she could have less than a year to live after
being diagnosed with a recurrence of her cervical
cancer in February.
The Taoiseach has promised me that he meant what he said.
The State is going to endeavor to settle all case through mediation.
If mediation doesn't work, and labs are contesting,
an alternative dispute resolution mechanism will be sculpted out.
Judge Meahan has been approached and will work on an
alternative approach to what is currently happening
in the case of Ruth Morrissey.
# (music)
Yeah, I'm living my life as if I'm going to be here.
You know, I'm not living my life as if I'm going to die.
You have to think that things will get better.
Very, very quiet hospital,
which is nice actually from the usual manicness.
I'm up for my CT scan.
So this is my second scan since I started on
the immunotherapy drug.
I suppose the reality of what may lie ahead of me if the scan
doesn't show any improvement or worse if it shows that my
tumours are growing
was unfortunately brought home to me actually this morning...
on my way up here,
one of the women...
Julie... I only picked up the message when I literally parked the car.
And she had a stroke.
She stroke last night, so she's paralysed, and can't talk.
My second scan hasn't shown any significant reductions in my tumours.
Stability is good when you're terminally ill
with a cancer like mine.
Julie, Julie O'Reilly died.
And now Emma Mhic Mahuna has died on Sunday morning.
That's two more.
So now we're up to 20.
You know, this just gets worse and worse.
Very scary.
So I really have to pull myself together,
now before I go home to the kids.
But, em...
We'll fight on.
# (sombre music)
It's frightening when you look at it, isn't it?
I think when you see the numbers down on paper,
and we see the women that are gone...
Bearing in mind this doesn't actually
reflect Emma Mhic Mhathúna and Julie O'Reilly
because they were still alive when I got this document.
Which is even more frightening.
So the fact that she was 18 women dead,
it doesn't actually show 20.
For many, this was the first opportunity to come together.
For others, the last few months have been spent campaigning for answers.
Often people ask me, you know, you're terminally ill,
you know, how are you not, you know, crying, and sad,
you know, how are you doing what you're doing?
Well, I can only explain it that I have this new sense of
purpose and I want to leave a legacy behind if I do die.
And I certainly don't think I'm going anywhere any time yet.
The HSE has identified 221 women affected by
the CervicalCheck controversy.
Today's meeting provided some of them, and their families,
with information and advice.
The cervical scandal, it's ripped families apart.
Mothers have been buried.
We saw Emma Mhic Mahuna, in the last couple of days,
being buried as well. Five children left behind.
Nobody wants to see that.
So this was why we're advocating to try and prevent
that from happening as much as possible.
Cervical cancer campaigner Vicky Phelan has said that
the crisis exposed a disrespect for women.
I would never have thought, I suppose myself
before I exposed all of this, that there was a kind of an underlying,
almost a disrespect for women, and women's health care,
when it comes to to our bodies.
And a lot of women have contacted me with horror
stories about some of the things their gynecologists have
said to them when they've had smears,
or even after having their babies.
In his cervical check inquiry report,
Dr. Gabriel Scally cited these women's experiences.
They went in for their disclosure meeting,
and the consultant said several times about the late woman's smoking habit
and also told them that nuns don't get cervical cancer.
Now, if that isn't paternalism...
it's verging on misogyny, isn't it?
On behalf of Waterford Institute of Technology Community,
it is my very great pleasure to welcome you
for the awarding of the WIT Honorary Fellowship
to Vicky Phelan.
(applause)
We now know that the CervicalCheck screening program
was doomed to fail.
It failed me.
It failed 20 women and families...
who lost their wives, mothers, daughters and friends.
It failed the 201 other women who, like me,
were misdiagnosed, and who are now either fighting to stay alive
or battling horrendous side effects of treatment
that may not have been necessary had the cancer been detected earlier.
I am up here for number ten of pembrolizumab.
So I'm in double digits now at this stage.
It's four days before my birthday.
I'm going to be 44 on Sunday. I was wondering if I'd even make it,
to be honest, at the start of the year.
So I say that's one thing to celebrate on Sunday,
is to still be here.
And still be so very well.
# Happy Birthday to you, Happy Birthday to you.
# Happy Birthday dear Mammy, Happy Birthday to you. #
(cheering)
# For she's a jolly good fellow... # No? Okay.
(laughter)
That's pretty cool.
I like the teeth.
That's pretty good.
Bit of an artist there.
All right, Amelia, show me yours.
I haven't started yet.
Amelia hasn't started yet. Okay, let's get over here.
Darragh.
Show me your pumpkin.
Oooooh, that's a scary one.
Like from Goosebumps, isn't it?
Yeah.
(applause)
To think that what I did for myself is now going to be made
available to other women across the country with cervical
cancer is just the best Christmas present that I
can give, to be honest, this year.
I just checked my phone before I came in here and Simon Harris
has just announced that he will be extending that drug
to all the other women.
Okay, Darragh this is December 2018.
It's only about four days to Christmas.
Four, yeah. Four days to Christmas.
Sit up on the chair.
So tell us, what do you want of Santa this Christmas?
A PS4 Pro and Match Attax. Uh-huh.
And my surprises I want is monopoly,
and my mam to get very, very better.
What do you mean, your mom to get very, very better?
Never have cancer again. That would be a brilliant surprise,
wouldn't it? Yeah.
Yeah. Do you think Santa could do something like that?
Maybe.
Yeah, we hope so, don't we?
Yeah.
You looking forward to Christmas Darragh?
Yeah.
Okay. Anything else you want to say about Christmas?
Eh, I love Christmas.
And I really want my mam to get better and never
have cancer again.
Thanks, Darragh.
I love you, buddy.
I love you too.
# (music)
It's now January 2019.
It's 12 months since I was given a 6 to 12
month prognosis, and I'm still here against all odds,
against my 6 to 12 months prognosis, and against all medical advice.
I'm still here.
I've been sick. I've been battling infections for the last...
Jesus, for six weeks,
I've had maybe two weeks in between both illnesses.
And this is where I have to get sick.
I just feel like I'm just worn out being sick,
really, at this stage and I'm in bad form.
I was talking to Jim this morning,
and Darragh hasn't spoken to me since I got in here.
He won't talk to me, because he's pissed off
and he's angry and I'm not there.
My poor little boy just wants me home.
But you are going home.
Yeah.
I didn't think I'd be in this position because our Taoiseach
told us that none of us would have to go through this.
But unfortunately, I'm the one who had to.
Ruth Morrissey's case, that of Ruth and Paul Morrissey,
that was treated differently.
And for whatever reason, the defendant laboratory's
Quest to MED LAB and the HSE decided that they were going to
defend that case and fight right to the end.
That became a 37 day trial, the longest medical negligence
trial in Irish legal history.
There's a family, there's a woman at the centre of this case.
How's she doing at the moment?
And not well is a short answer.
A statement was released to us by Cian O'Carroll Solicitors,
which represents the Morrissey family,
and it says that Ms. Morrissey's health
has deteriorated rapidly since the High Court judgment,
and that was only at the beginning
of last month.
And it says that Ms Morrissey spent the past five weeks
at a hospice in Limerick.
The reaction to the High Court decision in Ruth Morrissey's
case was really quite extraordinary.
There was an immediate and violent reaction
from the medical and the screening community and it received a lot
of coverage in the media.
Basically the argument was that the standard that was being now
imposed on medicine in Ireland was an unacceptably high one.
Even though this is the exact standard which is applied in
Northern Ireland and across the UK for 21 years now,
20 years prior to that judgement.
And yet the HSE, and its surrogates, were arguing that
a lesser standard should apply in Ireland and that a woman in
Dundalk should receive a lesser standard of care in cervical
screening than a woman in Newry.
And that couldn't be right.
And that's what the High Court had said.
It said this is a logical standard and all it is saying
is that if the screener has a doubt, when it looks down the
microscope and sees cells which may or may not be normal,
he or she cannot pass that slide as being normal.
They must pass it to a doctor to then make
a final determination.
That is all that the standard says.
President Michael D Higgins has led tributes to the
CervicalCheck campaigner
Ruth Morrissey, who has died at the age of 39.
Fellow campaigner Vicky Phelan paid tribute to her friend
on Twitter, describing her as one of the strongest and most
positive women she knew.
The main legal legacy there for that case,
and as we say, that traces right back to Vicky and Jim
Phelan's case was that in the first place the State was
forced to acknowledge, the HSE was forced to
acknowledge that it did have primary responsibility for the
running of its own entities.
The consequences of that not being the case, I think,
would have been wholesale outsourcing of medical services
within the public health system in Ireland to avoid liability
by the state.
From an overall view on cervical screening, the Supreme
Court gave clarity on what the test is to be applied in every
other case arising from CervicalCheck.
We are sorry for the failures of clinical governance.
Sorry for the failures of leadership and management.
Sorry for the failure to tell the whole truth
and to do so in a timely manner.
Sorry for the humiliation, the disrespect and deceit.
We apologise to those who survived and still bears
the scars, both physically and mentally,
as do their families.
We apologise to our wives, our daughters, our sisters,
and our mothers.
To the men who lost the centre of their lives and every day
have to pick up the pieces.
Today's apology is offered to all the people the state let
down and to their families who paid the price for those
failings as well.
A broken service, broken promises, broken lives,
a debacle that left a country heartbroken.
A system that was doomed to fail.
It's always at the back of my mind that the cancer is growing
in my body.
Pembrolizumab has given me all of this extra time to spend
with my family.
Unfortunately, it's not working anymore and my tumours
are growing again.
Her options in Ireland were becoming very limited and she
was looking again at palliative treatment.
So she went to the States.
# (music)
I had a terrible day on Sunday,
obviously leaving my kids.
That was the hardest day of all, to be quite honest.
I don't think I stopped crying, really, once I left Dublin airport.
Hi, everyone.
Happy Valentine's Day.
I've landed myself from hospital,
I've been vomiting for the past two days.
So I am one day post COVID vaccine and two days post-treatment.
I am flying it.
So it looks like my body is finally kind of getting used
to the treatments.
# Happy
# Birthday to you
# Happy Birthday to you... #
I worry about my kids and how they're handling all of this,
and I know they worry about me, too.
I have developed unfortunately developed a new symptom,
which you can probably see. The left hand side of my face
is like kind of like temporarily paralysed.
So I've got this thing called Bell's Palsy.
I had another scan here since September and the tumours that
had grown have grown again.
So all my hair is gone.
Unfortunately, that's after only one dose of chemo.
The only way I can describe it is like hell, really,
to be honest.
So I just decided no more chemotherapy.
I'll stick with the pembro
Probably won't, you know work
but it might keep me stable for another couple of weeks.
And that's all I want.
I just want another few weeks until Christmas to stay as
stable as I am at the moment.
I would rather my children have memories of doing stuff
with me, and if I go sooner, so be it.
But you know...
I loved... I heard that your daughter, Amelia,
always the young people tend to come out with the gems.
She said something along the lines of, you know, we kind of
hit the jackpot.
I mean, in having the time they've had with you, I mean,
what an attitude.
I mean, none of the adults came up with that.
She said to me when I had the conversation about where this
was going and, you know, hopefully we get
another few months.
But the reality is that this is not going to end well.
You know that I am going to die.
And she just said, well, it's just a matter of fact.
She's like me, you know. Exactly.
She's carbon copy like it's crazy.
We hop of each other needless to say.
I can imagine. But anyway, she said
But Mam said, sure, you've gotten nearly four years she said on Pembro.
Said they told you you were going to be gone in 6 to 12
months and you got nearly four years.
So you see.
For me,
it all boils down to that one decision to outsource Irish
women's smears to the USA in 2008.
The country was in a recession.
It was the cheapest option.
I have a message for Mna na hEireann I hope I have fought
enough for your future.
But now it's time for you to take the baton and stand
up for yourselves.
Question everything.
This fight was for you.