Cancer sufferer Amy Galvin to get keys to her independence

When Amy Galvin gets the keys to her apartment next week, it won’t just open the door to a new home, it will be a symbol of her innate ability to never give up.

Amy, 28, has been diagnosed with Stage 3C borderline terminal ovarian cancer.

She spent a year hooked up to a morphine drip, before taking the decision to break away and live her life on her own terms. Now, she says she is regaining her independence as she moves into her new home, an apartment at Cúirt Róisín in Galway City, one of 15 new high-quality, affordable rented units in Galway City provided by the Clúid Housing association.

“It will extend the quality of my life. My independence was taken away from me through my illness.”

Amy currently lives with her grandparents in another part of Galway city and her impending move is just the latest leg of a journey which took her from post-graduate study in child counselling and working in a Boots chemist at the weekend to her diagnosis in December 2013 and the gruelling treatment that followed.

“I had 34 rounds [of chemotherapy] between February 2014 to October 2014 and, in between that, two stem-cell procedures that failed, and four-and-a-half months in a wheelchair,” she says. A hospice became involved in her care and there was that 10-month period on a morphine drip, until a day last year when she said “enough”.

“I have always been on a good path, but I was probably not looking after myself, that type of feeling,” she says. “My faith was faded. One day, August 17, I just had a plea with God: Either take me now or show me a sign? I can’t do this any more.”

She says she picked up some books, including a psalm book, read it and wept. She decided to forsake the morphine, and follow alternative forms of treatment that she says benefitted her.

Clúid purchased the 15 apartments and completed what was an unfinished apartment block in partnership with Nama and Galway City Council. The scheme will be visited today by Minister for Housing, Planning, and Local Government Simon Coveney.

Amy has applied for funding for surgery in the UK and Switzerland, which could have further positive effects on her health, but in the short term, she is simply happy to be living her life. Her new neighbours can count themselves lucky: She has plans for her home which she hopes will be a place of respite for others in the block.

“Just colours, energies, not living in my bubble, but in a good clean environment, making a community-support system for the other people in the building and for myself,” is how she describes it.

Her aunt was diagnosed with a blood clot at 30, and lived another 30 years. Hope springs eternal.

“There is no timeline,” she adds. “Whatever will be will be.”