‘Hopefully, heads will roll for this. It needs to happen...’

AS the fallout after her court case developed into a fullblown scandal terminally illl mother-of-two Vicky Phelan gave a brave and honest interview to TV3 last night. Here, Mrs Phelan tells her story in her own words.

‘I’m fighting for the truth about what happened with my smear test, I’ve also had to fight tooth and nail to get access to an immunotherapy drug as well because it is not licensed for my cancer, and I’m paying for that drug myself.

Q: Do you accept the apologies?

‘I wasn’t expecting an apology at any point. To get three of them is pretty good. I do think Minister Simon Harris’s apology is very genuine and the fact that he’s already called for very swift action I think is a good sign. I would’ve liked an apology from the cervical screening programme, from the head of it. I know she did allude to it on Morning Ireland but I don’t think it went far enough in my case.

Q: Who do you blame for not notifying you?

‘To answer that bluntly, I blame Gráinne Flannelly, she’s the head of the programme and she knew about this going back to 2014. There are internal mails and memos between herself and my gynaecologist in Limerick, this was going over and back for a whole year and three months almost between herself and Kevin Hickey about trying to decide whose responsibility it was to notify me.

‘But that was a good two years after the audit took place. The audit took place in October 2014 and Mr Hickey wasn’t notified until July 2016.

‘The number of women under his care that were diagnosed, there was a list of 14 other women, including myself, on his list and Professor Flannelly wanted the clinicians to notify the women of the missed results.

‘My case was very clearly misdiagnosed and in my case I’m terminal; that may not be the case with the other women, so it’s important to say that.

‘But the issue I have is the fact that this information was hidden for three years before I found out and it would have made a difference in my case.’

Q: You had to take legal action, it was as if you were on trial and it wasn’t the people from the HSE or the clinic in the US who had to explain themselves in court.

‘Exactly, that was a part of the whole court case that I found very distressing for me and my family. I felt like a victim up there while giving my evidence, I’m a sick woman at the end of the day, I’ve got terminal cancer.

‘I am good for a couple of hours. A court room is not the place to be when you’re in my condition with very bad back pain and you’re sitting on these extremely hard seats and then you’re made to answer these very personal questions about how cervical cancer has affected you emotionally, psychologically, my marriage, my sex life.

‘So I feel very aggrieved that I had to go up there and tell the world about my situation and these people who are responsible didn’t have to get up there and do anything.’

Q: What would you like the legacy of your case to be?

‘First of all, I think it’s really important for me to say this, because what I really do not want happening is I don’t want women not going in to have their screening because I think the screening programme is a good programme.

‘I think the problem is the management and the way things are handled and I do want to see, and I’m glad to see there’s going to be a review of it and I would like to see that some heads are, hopefully, going to roll after this because I think that needs to happen.

‘But I do think screening for cervical cancer is vital because it is an incurable cancer. I tested for that, I’m going to be fighting for the rest of my life to stay alive, there is no cure for what I have.

‘And if cancer is caught early, in my case if my smear was caught in 2011, there’s a 90% chance I would have been cured at that point.

‘And the treatment I would have had to have would have been a hysterectomy. That’s it. I would never have had chemotherapy, radiation, suffering from all these side-effects, early menopause.

‘So I really don’t want women not going for their smear tests. What I do want to see is the whole cervical screening programme hauled over the coals.

‘The issue I have is the mismanagement of it but also the fact all these smears are going to a laboratory in America and I don’t agree with that. And Professor Shepherd the gynaecological expert for my legal team, alluded to that on the stand that it was a standard the American scientists are not as stringent as the ones in the UK.

‘Why aren’t we sending them to the UK or, I know there’s obviously not enough laboratories in Ireland to do all this, but I really would like that looked at.’

Q: How are your family emotionally with the public nature of this case?

‘It’s been very difficult, very difficult. My daughter was very upset today. It suddenly hit her because she had been reading the headlines over the last couple of weeks because I have had a campaign trying to raise funds before, I didn’t know how long this case was going to take, but she did see some of the headlines, but obviously over the last couple of days it’s been much more doom and gloom and that’s very hard for her to hear.

‘She knows I’ve had cancer before so up to that point she probably thought, “Mammy’s had cancer before, she’s had it again but she’s fine.”

‘Now everything’s come out in the media she knows that’s not the case. I’m very ill and there’s a chance I won’t recover from this.

‘But she knows her mammy well, she knows what I’m like, I’m going to fight and fight and fight and that’s what I’ll do.

‘I’ll go from one treatment to another until I find something that works.

‘But it has been very emotional, my parents, it’s been very hard, the day they came up to watch me give evidence in court was very difficult for them to watch, very difficult.

‘It’s one thing knowing that I have cancer and a chance I may not survive it but it’s another thing hearing me talking about it in an open court.

‘I’m delighted with the outcome and I really hope this will affect the change for the women of Ireland.

‘I did this because I have a daughter coming up and I have other friends and women and I was very adamant that I wanted to go public with this because it was important to me to do that. And I am so delighted that things are going to change and that, to me, is very important and I’m very happy.’