‘I can change it for others’: the woman who exposed Irish smear tests scandal
If a test in 2011 had been accurate, Vicky Phelan might have avoided cancer. Now she is trying to give some hope to terminal patients
When Vicky Phelan was told in January 2018 to get her affairs in order because she had less than a year to live, she crumpled. “The legs went from under me,” she recalled.
Emerging from the doctor’s office she avoided the gazes of her daughter and mother waiting outside and sought refuge in a bathroom. “I was in there for about 20 minutes. I bawled my eyes out.”
She composed herself, and then came the anger – not just for the prognosis of terminal cervical cancer but for the medical blunders that preceded it.
“I’ve always been bullheaded and stubborn,” she said. “I thought: I’m not taking
