Meabh came home to be cared for but was failed by our system

READING the tragic story of Meabh Feerick, a young mother who passed away from cancer this week, I couldn’t help shake a sense of déjà vu, a feeling that I’ve heard so many similar, heartbreaking stories before.

Here was a beautiful, 25-year-old mum, who one month ago spoke out about being failed by the Irish health system due to delays in accessing treatment for her terminal skin cancer.

On October 17, she told how her life had been shortened because she returned to Ireland from Australia to spend her last few months here.

Meabh, pictured, had been diagnosed with incurable genetic skin cancer in December 2020, and as her condition worsened, she made the decision to spend the last of her time at home.

The last months of her life should have been filled with precious memories, quality time with her boy. Instead, she had to fight for scans that were unavailable, and as a result for treatment to prolong her life that didn’t come.

‘I feel robbed, and Noah as well – he’s being robbed of a lot,’ she told the Mail. ‘I want him to know that his mother stood up to this and said: “It’s not good enough”.’

Being robbed of life – and young life at that – is a phrase that has cropped up more times than it should over the last few years, and incidentally it seems to come from the mouths of women.

The CervicalCheck scandal continues to rob mothers from their children, daughters from their mothers and partners from each other, and it will do so for years to come.

You would think that we would have learnt from our past mistakes – that there can be no excuses, no margin of error, no room for delay and no obstacles to receiving care.

That we need to be taken seriously, our concerns heard.

But just this week, a new report from the National Women’s Council (NWC) revealed how disabled women and those from abusive and marginalised backgrounds have raised concerns about how they are treated in the health system.

Not surprisingly, a common theme expressed by the women in the study group was ‘frustration at the lack of being listened to and taken seriously in healthcare interactions’.

Speaking on the report, NWC director Orla O’Connor said: ‘In their own words, women have detailed how poor experiences of healthcare erode trust in the system and, in many cases, cause women to withdraw from vital care. These experiences included failures to take health concerns of women seriously.’

An example of this was how the physical design of facilities in our hospitals resulted in some disabled women being unable to access mammograms and cervical smear tests – one woman did not have a cervical smear test in over 11 years due to the trauma of a previous experience.

It’s hardly coincidental that it’s women who continually seem to bear the brunt of error and inadequacy in healthcare. We have a long history of being sidelined in the medical field, initially stemming from historical, cultural and practical issues – with trials and research all centred on the opposite sex.

Women were seen as too vulnerable to include in studies of new drugs and interventions, so a ‘bikini medicine’ approach was adopted, meaning medical professionals tended to focus on the bikini-defined areas, concentrating on the breasts and the reproductive organs, while essentially ignoring the rest of the woman. This mentality is changing, but it’s slow. And unfortunately this progression is particularly hampered in a healthcare system like ours that’s already creaking under pressure.

We didn’t think it could get much worse as the pandemic dealt its hammer blow but then in May it did.

The ransomware attack affected almost every part of our already wornout healthcare system, and recently, hospital consultants warned that for the above reasons, it could take up to 14 years to get patient waiting lists under control.

There’s other excuses too that we can blame – the poor physical infrastructure of many hospitals, the ongoing money drain of the National Children’s Hospital and the dire shortage of staff.

But back to Meabh and how frustrated she was at being terminally ill in this country. ‘Patients that have very little time left are waiting, waiting for everything,’ she explained in October.

She saw first hand the stretch across Ireland’s major hospitals, where people with ‘different illnesses are thrown into the same room’, and patients wait on trolleys for hours. Meabh was part of that chaos, and tragically, in the end, she was a victim of it.

Her wish was that, by speaking out, her son will know how hard she fought to stay with him. ‘I don’t want him ever in this system,’ she said.

Meabh returned home to be cared for, and we let her down. Her parting words should serve as a chilling reminder that excuses don’t cut the mustard any more. For a mother gone too soon and a son who will not remember her, really, truly, it’s not good enough.