Consultant knew for years ... so why didn’t he tell us? asks cancer victim’s husband
‘I feel like I have no purpose’ ‘Please don’t die, I love you’
THE husband of a woman dying of cancer has revealed his anger and horror with her consultant for not telling them her smear tests may have been misread.
Ruth Morrissey and her family were only told her devastating news by her gynaecologist, Dr Matt Hewitt, after Vicky Phelan bravely challenged the HSE and exposed the CervicalCheck scandal.
Her husband Paul paid a poignant tribute to Ruth yesterday, telling how she is everything to him and their seven-year-old daughter, Libby,
The warehouse manager said the couple – together since their teens and married for ten years – are ‘very close’. He added: ‘She’s everything. She’s not just my wife, she’s my best friend, and the only person I can speak to, the only person I go to if I have a problem. We go to everything together. We go to Munster rugby together. We’re fans, we like our sports.’
And in her own heartbreaking comments, Ruth said: ‘You find yourself waking up at two or three in the morning, staring at your husband, trying to take in every possible part of his face, thinking how long you are going to be around to see him, to share the time with him, then you go to look at Libby.’
She added: ‘I feel like I have no purpose any more.’
Mr Morrissey said he could not believe that the consultant treating his wife had known for almost two years that errors were made in interpreting the smear tests, and had not told them.
‘I couldn’t believe that somebody there to help you, someone who you trust so much, someone that you place your life in their hands and trust 100% – you imagine they would make that call, and not wait for you to come down. They would ring. It never happened. The trust has gone,’ the distraught husband said.
‘It was terrible. I couldn’t even look at him.’
The Morrisseys were giving evidence on the second day of their High Court bid for compensation from the HSE, and from the two labs which they allege wrongly told her that routine smear tests taken in 2009 and 2012 were clear.
Ms Morrissey, 37, from Monaleen, Co. Limerick, was diagnosed with cervical cancer in 2014 after she went to her GP with bleeding. It was successfully operated on, but recurred in 2017.
She said that after she contacted CervicalCheck, on hearing of Ms Phelan’s case in April, she was asked to meet her consultant gynaecologist, Dr Matt Hewitt.
‘He explained to me there had been an audit in 2014, and I was part of that audit. He showed me a piece of paper in my file that had indicated that two of my previous smears had been misread,’ she recalled. ‘I was surprised. I kind of expected to hear one was wrong, but to hear two – I didn’t expect that. I was taken aback. He apologised that he forgot to tell me.’
He said he told some other patients about the review, but not her. She asked him why, when she had seen him every few months for three years, but he told her he had not seen it, she said.
She then broke down. Her lawyers said Dr Hewitt knew the outcome of the review since June 2016 and Ms Morrissey believes he only told her in May ‘because he was told he had to tell me’.
She did not think she would have found out otherwise, she said, adding that a second oncologist who had treated her ‘also failed to tell me’. Her recent symptoms include pain in her leg, pelvis and hip and difficulty sleeping.
Her concentration is not good, and she feels lonely and isolated without her job, which involved travelling around Europe as a UPS delivery service supervisor.
Asked about the prognosis that she may only have between 12 and 24 months to live, she said: ‘I think it’s devastating. You have to dig really deep, I mean really deep, to try to come to peace with the fact you are not going to be the same person you used to be.
‘Your outcome and perspective has changed. I am not frightened of dying, but I don’t want to die, and there’s a big difference.’
Her daughter had longed for a brother or sister and it is heartbreaking to know they could never have another child. ‘That’s been taken from me,’ she said.
Asked how much Libby knew about her mother’s illness, Mr Morrissey said: ‘She knows to a certain extent what Ruth is facing. She’s very smart, a lot smarter than me. She knows something is going on and she’s worried.
‘We have a routine at bedtime, I read her a book and when I’m finished I give her a kiss and Ruth comes in and give her cuddles.
‘Ruth settles her down. But when you hear her talking to your wife, saying “please don’t die, I love you, don’t leave”, it’s heartbreaking, devastating.’
He said he feels anxious all the time about Ruth’s wellbeing, and completely stressed, which had affected his own health. He also feels very angry, about the mistakes and the lack of candour.
He was devastated to think he was going to lose his wife, and Libby was going to lose her mother. ‘She’s everything to me. To think she’s never going to see her daughter have her communion, her confirmation, get married. It’s just soul destroying. It’s heart breaking,’ he said.
‘You only have one mam. Cuddles from me are not the same as cuddles from mammy. Nothing makes you stronger.’
The case continues today. The two laboratories, Quest Diagnostics and Medlab Pathology, deny all the claims. The HSE has admitted a breach of duty in not telling Ms Morrissey about the audit, but denies that it is responsible for the laboratories’ analysis.