A woman of substance
“In September of last year I was still cancer free,” says Vicky Phelan. “Or so I believed. I didn’t nd out until two months later, following a scan, that it was back. I had very few symptoms, apart from an ache in my lower back and I was carrying weight around my stomach. But I was 43 and had hit the menopause so I gured that was it. When I got the news in November it was a real slap in the face. At that stage, I had a 10-cm tumour inside me and it was growing all the time. By the time of the court case in April I had to wear maternity clothes. I really didn’t think I’d see this Christmas. at’s the simple truth.”
We are in a bar in a budget hotel in the centre of Dublin. It’s early evening and the room is almost empty. It has been a long day for Vicky Phelan, who travelled by train from her home in Limerick for an a ernoon meeting with the patient support group 221+. She hasn’t checked into her room yet, her travel bags sit beside her: one emblazoned with the message: “Happiness Comes in Waves.” As we talk over a beer, Vicky occasionally trawls through her phone to show an attachment (a letter from her GP, notes from her medical le, legal correspondence) illustrating a point in the various chapters of her story. Straight-talking and logical, I tell that she would make a great detective. She laughs.
Last year Vicky Phelan was just another regular citizen: manager of the Literacy Development Centre in Waterford Institute of Technology, a mother to two young children, Amelia (12) and Darragh (7) and wife to Jim. In 2011, she had been given the all-clear following a screening for cervical cancer, but in November 2017, she was told she in fact had cancer. It would later emerge that not only were the results of her 2011 smear test wrong but Cervicalcheck didn’t inform her GP of the ‘misdiagnosis’ for two years and it would be a further 15 months before she herself was told. She was not alone, as hundreds of other women had also been given incorrect smear test results and not been told.
In April of this year, Vicky settled her High Court action against Clinical Laboratories of Austin, Texas for €2.5m. In July, together with Stephen Teap, whose wife Irene died from cervical cancer, along with Lorraine Walsh,
Vicky founded 221+, a patient support group for women and their families a ected by the scandal. For her work she has received an
It has been an extraordinary year for Vicky Phelan, the woman who exposed the Cervicalcheck screening scandal. She talks to Donal O’donoghue about the trauma of her diagnosis, being there for her family and finding her true vocation
honorary doctorate from the University of Limerick and an honorary Fellowship from WIT and last month, she was named by the BBC as one of its 100 inspiring and influential women in the world in 2018.
Yet in January of this year (she didn’t want to do it before Christmas) when Vicky Phelan went to see her oncologist at Limerick Hospital, she could never have anticipated what would follow. That day, her mother, Gabe, and daughter Amelia were with her but she went into the room by herself, “as I normally do.” Pressing the consultant, Phelan faced the hard truth of her cancer. With palliative chemo she was given 12 months to live: without it, the prognosis was six. “I’ll never forget that day,” she says. “My legs went to jelly. Fortunately there was a toilet just off the consultant’s office and when my appointment was over I went in there to pull myself together. I was in there for 15 minutes and very nearly broke down.”
From that moment Vicky, who had been told by the consultant to go home and get her affairs in order, was determined to do whatever she could to survive. But what was initially a battle against cancer, very quickly became a battle with the system as she uncovered a national scandal that would shake the HSE to its core. Insisting that she get a biopsy before commencing treatment, Phelan found a report from 2011 in her medical file on the day of her procedure on January 19th. “It said the original result showed no abnormality detected but a review of the smear revealed that I had full-blown cancer,” she says, as she shows me an image of the file on her phone. “And there was a page missing too. That was the day I decided I’m taking this further.”
Four days later she contacted a legal firm
(she shows me the mail to her solicitor, Cian O’carroll) telling them of her intention and that time was not on her side. After that, things moved quickly and the scale of the scandal emerged. “On the day my court case finished, I was very sick but Cian told me that the media would be looking for a statement. He asked me what I was most angry about and I said ‘trust’. I trusted those people and yet they hid information from me about my health that I should have known.” Following the High Court settlement, Clinical Pathology Laboratories wanted Phelan to sign a confidentiality clause as part of the settlement of the case. That was never going to happen.
It is estimated that there are over 221 women affected by the Cervicalcheck screening scandal (hence the support group name, 221+). Phelan believes that the actual number could be much higher. “At least one hundred more,” she says, adding that the lack of definitive numbers arises from various parts of the health systems not talking to each other. Vicky was also friendly with Emma Mhic Mhathúna, another highprofile woman affected by the scandal, who died in October at the age of 37. “Emma’s death really knocked me for six because she so vital and full of life,” says Phelan. Cian O’carroll, the solicitor who also represented Mhic Mhathúna, contests that the scandal is still being covered up. “I don’t think that this is the end of it by any means, I think that there is more to come,” says Phelan.
Vicky Phelan is no stranger to trauma or challenge. As a 19-year-old student, she was involved in a tragic two-car accident in which three people died and she spent four months recovering in hospital. Weeks before her birth, Amelia was diagnosed with congenital toxoplasmosis and in 2014 was badly burned in an accident at home. “People sometimes ask me ‘How do you keep going with all the sh*t that’s been thrown at you?’ and I say ‘You don’t have a choice’,” says Phelan. “Well you do have a choice and I have gone down to that dark place and been very depressed. But that doesn’t work because it’s not just me suffering. It’s my kids and my husband who are suffering too. So I have to deal with those things. Running helped me (she completed the Belfast marathon in 2008 in a fraction over four hours).”
And Vicky has always been up-front with her children about her illness. Following the High Court settlement, a classmate of Darragh’s quizzed him about his mother. “He came home and asked me: ‘Are you going to die, Mum?’ I said to him, ‘What do you think?’ At that stage I was quite ill. Darragh told me that I was very sick and always in bed and that was awful to listen to. So I told him I was on a new drug and it was working. I said it’s like Star Wars - he’s mad into Star Wars - and I drew a big tumour like the Death Star and the drug was like the little fighter planes which take pieces off the tumour every time they attack. I told him that it would take a while but they are chipping away all the time.”
Since April, Vicky has been on the immunotherapy drug pembrolizumab, having fought to be put on the clinical trials. “(Chemotherapy) hadn’t worked the first time so why should it work for me now?” Since she started treatment, the tumour has reduced in size and her condition has stabilised. “The first scan showed that the tumour had shrunk well over 50 per cent,” she says. “The second scan, I have them after every three treatments, showed a smaller shrinkage. Hopefully it is contained. The downside is that the tumour is close to vital organs like kidneys, liver and lungs, so if it spreads I am screwed. I know that I will never get a cure unless a new drug comes out but this will buy me time and as always I have a backup plan.”
The past year has changed Vicky Phelan: now she believes she has found her true calling.
“My sister knew from the age of seven that she wanted to be a hairdresser and I envied that certainty. I never really found a niche even though I loved my work with adult literacy.
Then this came along and in a way it became my vocation. There are times I get angry and frustrated but I believe that this was what I was born for. Back when I had that bad car crash I was put into an induced coma for a week. My father later told me that at one point I said that my grandmother appeared to me when I was clinically dead. She was angry, which my grandmother never was, and she was telling me to go back, that it wasn’t my time.”
Life now is one day at a time for Vicky. “I was always planning holidays and panicking over stupid stuff,” she says. “I don’t sweat that stuff any more (although she admits to being a bit of a control freak).” She doesn’t run these days (“too much radiation in my hips”) and misses the buzz and freedom. But she has other things to keep her busy and focused. Apart from 221+ she is working on a memoir and there is a TV documentary in the pipeline. “I just want change now,” she says. “I have a daughter and I don’t want this happening to her. I want a screening programme that people can trust. I did what I did because it was the right thing to do. And I’d do it again in a shot.”
221+ provides structured support and services for the women and their families affected by the Cervicalcheck scandal. Further information at 221plus.ie
I’ll never forget that day. My legs went to jelly Darragh asked me: ‘are you going to die, mum?’