Patricia’s story: ‘I no longer worry about my tests anymore and I am happy to get on with my life’

A MOTHER of two teenage children believed she had been handed a death sentence when she was diagnosed with leukaemia in August 2003.

Patricia Dever, 41, from Achill Island, Co Mayo, feared the worst before a wonder drug changed her life for the better.

“Now with the support of my family and Glivec, I no longer worry about my tests anymore and I am happy to get on with my life,” she said.

Up until her diagnosis, the only occasions Patricia was in hospital was to have her two children.

“I was getting headache, but my mother had died very suddenly, two months before, and I thought they might have been stress related,” she recalled.

After suffering a particularly bad headache during the August bank holiday weekend a friend persuaded her to visit her doctor who ordered a blood test after examining her.

Patricia was sent to Galway University Hospital for treatment the day she received the diagnosis.

“I only had the disease for about three months. The type of leukaemia I have is almost symptom free so I was lucky to have had the blood test,” she said.