Laura Brennan Meet the 26-year-old Clare campaigner whose life is the subject of a new four-part documentary, This is Me
Diagnosed with cervical cancer in 2017, 26- year- old campaigner Laura Brennan’s new documentary This is Me follows her life with a terminal illness. She chats to Jess O Sullivan about her ongoing campaign to protect future generations from the disease
US president Franklin D. Roosevelt once said: “Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the assessment that something else is more important than fear.” This seems a fitting quote for 26-year-old Laura Brennan, a brave young woman from Co Clare who in September 2017 received the news that her cervical cancer was incurable. At the time, she had a busy lifestyle that she loved, working as a sales manager, but three days after the diagnosis she found herself sitting in her car in a hotel car park in Killarney, thinking about the fact that she would have to hand in her notice the next day. “My career was something that was always so important to me, and I knew the next day I was giving it up for the rest of my life, basically.”
Laura’s thoughts immediately went to others. “Sitting there I said I would do everything in my power so nobody else will be in this situation.” Knowing her cancer was related to the HPV virus, which is responsible for 70% of cervical cancer cases, and knowing that her path could have been very different had she received the vaccine, she opened up her Facebook app and sent a message to the HSE offering to share her story publicly in order to encourage girls to get vaccinated. “I knew there was nothing I could do about myself at that stage other than to go to palliative care to give myself the best quality of life for as long as possible, which is what I’m doing at the moment. But if I could leave something behind and protect the next generation from what I’ve been through, and what my family are going through, it would be selfish not to try.” Since then, Laura has never wavered from her mission. She has appeared in a HPV vaccine campaign for the World Health Organization (WHO) with her parents in a poignant video, as well as appearing on The Late Late Show, and speaking regularly in public about her case. But since last November, she has taking her objective one step further, and even closer to home, allowing a camera crew to follow her journey of living with a terminal illness for the new four-part documentary Laura Brennan: This Is Me. “There’s a chance that I wouldn’t have gotten the cancer if I’d gotten the vaccine, so if people see the reality of the other side of the story – my friend got the vaccine, who is the same age as me and we were discussing how different our lives are because she got a vaccine and I didn’t.”
Laura’s journey is one she shares with her parents and her three older brothers, who have all supported her campaign from the start and have also taken part in the documentary. “It took a while [to convince them]. It was about them seeing how effective my message was. I never wanted them to feel pressurised into anything, but I had a message that I really wanted to get out there. They always wanted to support me in getting my message out and family is such a bit part of my life that if they were missing, it would feel like a piece of the puzzle was missing.”
Laura lists what the crew captured over the last few months: Her day-to-day life with her family; the awards she received but insists she didn’t deserve; and the ongoing immunotherapy treatment she gets every three weeks if her blood tests are good. It is administered via a drip like chemotherapy but doesn’t have the same side-effects such as hair loss. “They actually filmed one day when my blood counts were too low, which means I can’t receive treatment. That was an upsetting time because there’s nothing you can do about it. They also recorded one of the times I was in hospital.” She was an in-patient for 15 days in January and her brother had to fly home quickly from the Middle East where he works. “He came home the first week in January after just being gone for a week and a half because I was hospitalised and they thought I wasn’t going to come out.” Her brother has only just flown back this week.
But there are also special and happy moments for the family in the documentary, which coincide with Laura’s other message: You can live with cancer, and live a very normal life. As filming is ongoing, this week the crew followed Laura and her support network of friends on a spa day in Kilkenny. “We also went visiting Santa as a family at Christmas, which was really cute. It was the one thing I wanted to do this year, so it was a lovely family moment.” Laura is amazed and infuriated by the misinformation put about by anti-vaccination campaigners. Amazed that people would consider any other option in the face of solid proof when it comes to reducing the risk of their child developing this terrible disease; and infuriated that the anti-vax movement has caused people to think twice about vaccinating their daughters. “It’s so important. To have a vaccine that can prevent cancer? That should be screamed and shouted about. And people are saying no to it? If we woke up in the morning and we had a vaccine against breast cancer, could you imagine the celebrations in the street?”
In September last year, the HSE reported an increase in HPV vaccination rates, with uptake levels now at 70% – an increase of 15% in a year. However, Laura says she won’t stop until there is at full uptake. “If I ever did anything in my life I got involved in it 100%, I never give anything less.” If anything, she says, the statistics only make her feel like she has to work harder to get the facts out there, encouraging people to get their information from reputable sources. “I was always that really loud kid who was never quiet when she was meant to be. But now I say at least I can use my voice for good.” This woman’s bravery and selflessness in the face of terminal illness is truly a humbling thing.
There’s a chance that I wouldn’t have gotten the cancer if I’d gotten the vaccine, so if people see the reality of the other side of the story – my friend got the vaccine, who is the same age as me and we were discussing how different our lives are because she got a vaccine