'It is inhumane to drag a dying woman into court to get an apology'

Patricia Carrick. “If there was ever an advocate for CervicalCheck it was, and remains, Trish,' says husband Damien.“The system failed her but it’s still a good system as it has helped save so many other lives.”  Picture: Ciarán MacChoncarraige

Patricia Carrick has made the news twice in her life.

In 2017, millions of American TV viewers watched a programme that featured an Irish family that had travelled to Nebraska from Galway to witness that year’s solar eclipse.

That was the 51-year-old's astronomy buff's family, and it was one of the happiest days of her life.

Last Tuesday, the mother-of-four made the news again.

She won an unprecedented apology from the HSE, and MedLabs —  the company that missed the cervical cancer that is slowly killing her.

She had had no idea that when herself and her husband Damien were being interviewed by an ABC News affiliate for national news coverage of the eclipse back in August 2017, the cancer already growing within her had been missed the year before.

The confirmation she had cancer wouldn’t happen for another two years.

Patricia, her son Ciaran, and and Damien Carrick.

And by then, it was too late to do anything about it other than try and buy some time with Damien, and her children Ciarán, 23, Ríoghna, 20, Sorcha, 17 and Eoin, 14.

“I’ll never forget the day she found out,” Damien said of that day on Monday, July 29, 2019.

"She was at work. It was about 9.30am, 9.45am when she got a call on her mobile phone from an office number she didn’t recognise.

She answered it. It was a consultant and they informed her they had read the results of an MRI she had had and they told her it looked like she had cancer. And they also told her that it looked like it was spreading

Patricia was completely stunned.

She asked: “What on earth are you talking about?” 

She was told: “Yes, it looks like it’s endometrial cancer.” 

Gathering her handbag, she hurried out of her office in Galway Mayo Institute of Technology — where she works as an administrator  — in a daze, still on the phone.

As she approached her car in the company car park, she fumbled for her keys, unlocked the door and quietly sobbed as she was told she would have to go to Dublin for more tests.

“All she remembers is that she was told she was to go to Dublin, the following day for the appointment,” Damien, 50, said.

As she collapsed in tears into the driver’s seat of her car, she called her husband and told him the news.

“She was completely distraught,” he remembers.

She was so upset, she couldn’t drive out of the car park. I drove over to be with her. She was in an absolute flood of tears, in a complete and utterly distraught state

"I literally sat there for an hour trying to console her. It was hard to get any words out of her, she was so upset.” 

Of his own reaction, he recalled: “I just went into fight mode. It was pure ‘I’m here to fix this’ mode.

“I need to be strong here, I told myself, and that was it. We needed to organise where to put the children when we were in Dublin. Planning around our lives was going to change."

History of tragedy

Up to that point in their life, the couple had already had more than their share of tragedy.

Patricia had suffered a stillbirth — a baby girl — in 1996, two years after they married, and she later suffered three miscarriages.

Added to that, her mother, Myra, had died of cancer at the age of 68.

And her sister, Aileen Reidy, had also fought her own battle with breast cancer in 2014.

“We had had a few kicks in the teeth up to that moment in our lives,” Damien said.

“And we thought we were going to get a clear run and then this happened.” Leaving their children in the hands of others, they drove to Dublin the following day.

“We spent most of the journey in silence,” he recalled.

“The radio wasn’t on. It was a very different type of drive to the one we were used to.

Patricia cried a lot. As other cars passed us, it felt like we were in some kind of a bubble apart from the rest of the world, looking at everybody else going about their business

“None of the other drivers or their passengers could have had any idea what we were going through in that car as we drove along or what the ramifications were for us, and what was ahead of us.

“We were still hopeful at that stage, but we didn’t know what was ahead of us."

The couple got to the Mater Private early, parked up, and then headed in.

“We were hovering around, wondering where we were supposed to go,” he recalled.

Damien Carrick, husband of Patricia Carrick, of Oranmore, Co. Galway, speaking to media outside the High Court yesterday on Tuesday after they settled their action against the HSE. Picture: Collins Courts

“Eventually we went in and we were sitting in a very cold hall. It was a cold, clinical hall of a waiting area before we went in for the consultation.

“The consultant saw us, chatted to us for an hour and followed with an examination.” 

And over the coming days, she had a CT scan, an MRI and a laparoscopy.

The following week, on Tuesday, August 6, they travelled back for the results.

This time around, they didn’t have long to wait before they were ushered into their consultant’s rooms, past other people in the waiting area.

“He was sitting facing the two of us,” Damien recalled.

“We were sitting together. He had a nurse with him. We talked for about 10 or 15 minutes about how Trish was feeling.

“Then, he told us. I can't remember exactly what he said. It might have been something on the lines of ‘What we have here is cervical cancer, it has spread to the ovaries and it is contained in the pelvic area’.” 

The room fell silent.

“There was a moment of silence,” Damien recalled.

There was a very long pregnant pause. Nobody spoke. The only sound was the sound of Trish sobbing. She had a look of disbelief on her face, as if she couldn’t believe he had actually confirmed it was cervical cancer

The shell-shocked couple travelled back to Galway that day, again mostly in silence.

And again, they gathered their children around them and told them what they had been told.

Delivering heartbreaking news to children

Indeed, the couple has been open about the situation from day one.

“The evening Trish got that call at work on July 29, 2019, we told the children,” Damien said.

Patricia Carrick.

“Trish hadn’t wanted to tell them but after we talked about it, we both decided it was the thing to do. She waited in the bedroom, while I went to the bottom of the stairs and called up to the children and asked them to come down.

“They were all in their bedrooms, presumably playing games or watching YouTube or whatever teenagers do. I sat the three of them down, and closed the door of the sitting-room behind me, and then I told them.

There was silence, and then there were tears. There weren’t many questions because I think they were all trying to process what I had told them

“And, a short while later, Trish knocked on the door and walked into the room.

“It was very quiet. I think everybody, myself included, was stuck for words. One of my daughters walked over to Trish and gave her a hug.” 

Eoin, the couple’s youngest, wasn’t in the conversation.

He is autistic and would not have understood what was going on.

“If you told him what day it was, he’d argue that it was a different day,” Damien says.

“We haven’t told him. It’s just too much information. But the rest have never been in the dark about what is going on. They understand where this is all leading.

“From day one, we have been very open with them about it and just talk about it openly and honestly.

“They are brainy kids and sometimes they come up with questions that we wouldn't have thought of. On that first evening though, I did wonder if I was doing the right thing.

“I was looking at them and in my head, wondering what do I do now, as a father? Have I done the right thing?

“Are they going to be okay? I was wondering how they were going to cope, and had I done the right thing because obviously there is no textbook or script.

“Parenting up to that point had been a lot of ‘go to bed’, ‘get up’, ‘go to school’, ‘do your homework’.

“Now here was the real test of my parenting skills. This was the real deal.” 

Dealing with devastation

There are moments when he is on his own that he will get upset.

“It’s not that I try to hide it from everybody,” he said.

“But it just ends up being a very spontaneous thing that just hits me.” He says he could be doing something completely random, like listening to the radio or making a coffee when suddenly tears will well up in his eyes.

"I was in my mother Eileen’s house a couple of weeks ago,” he said.

“I was doing a small bit of work. I was helping her with some rubbish and I just broke down completely in front of my mother.” 

The first time Patricia started to worry about herself was when, in 2016, she noticed unusual blood spots.

This was before she had a smear test in 2016. Up to that point, she had always been — as Damien puts it  — “very diligent” about her health.

Every day, she would come home from work and walk 6k.

And every single time a letter dropped through the post box telling her to get a smear test, she would be straight on the phone to book it, and she would make sure to chase up results.

Of the recent smear tests she had, those in 2012, 2014, and 2016 all came back negative.

“If there was ever an advocate for CervicalCheck it was —  and remains  —Trish,” Damien said.

“The system failed her but it’s still a good system as it has helped save so many other lives.” 

When she got the negative results of her 2016 smear test, she called Damien and told him.

“She told me ‘this is great news’,” he recalled.

“At least we know it’s not cancer, she told me.” 

Life went back to normal, but by 2018, the bleeding had got so bad she was unable to get a smear test done until — she was told  — the bleeding stopped.

She was also starting to experience pains in her lower back, which she initially just put down to her getting older.

She eventually had the test —  which looks for pre-cancerous cells — done in 2019, and it also came back clear.

The letter that accompanied it said she should get tested again in five years' time, as she had turned 50.

Thanks to the persistence of her GP, Dr Niamh O’Brien, in getting her seen by specialists, she had an MRI scan done. She also had a colposcopy done.

And it was the results of these tests that led up to that call on July 29, 2019.

Cian O’Carroll, of Cian O’Carroll Solicitors, solicitor for Patricia and Damien Carrick. outside the High Court. Picture: Collins Courts

Why the family ever contacted Vicky Phelan’s solicitor Cian O’Carroll after that came about after the Limerick woman’s own High Court fight.

The whole CervicalCheck controversy erupted with Ms Pelan’s victory a few months into 2018.

But it had really captured national attention by the abrupt death in October that year of mother-of-five Emma Mhic Mhathúna.

Like more than 200 other women, she too had been given inaccurate negative test results.

“We had seen all this going on and we just wondered if Trish might be one of those women,” Damien recalled.

“She didn’t see the point in going into it but in the end we decided to call Cian, who has been brilliant.” 

After an investigation by experts appointed by Mr O’Carroll, the Carricks were called in January 2020 and told there was a difficulty with one of the test results and that was the 2016 result.

“That was another day that knocked us for six,” Damien said.

It just didn’t make any sense to us. Trish had a clear result in 2019, and now we're being told there was a problem with an earlier result. It wasn’t until we saw the expert’s report, and it was there in black and white

The couple feels very angry about what has happened, for obvious reasons.

But one thing that really gets to them both is the awful realisation that everything that has happened might have been avoided if they had been able to catch the  cancer in time.

“What on earth were the people in MedLab doing,” Damien asks.

“How could they get this so wrong? It really makes us angry when we realise what has happened. I don’t know if anger is the right word.

“We were so gone past anger at that stage and instead went into the realisation that this could all have been stopped.

Trish was completely distraught, again. It’s a horrible thing to be told you have cancer, but if someone in a lab somewhere had done their job correctly, you wouldn’t have cancer

The resulting apology, which is unprecedented, was read out at the Four Courts in Dublin on Tuesday and duly made news that day.

The photograph of Patricia that accompanied those media reports came from the family and was a very striking black and white image.

It shows her looking almost defiantly away from the camera and into the distance.

It was taken on the front lawn of the family home in Oranmore, Co Galway, by her eldest son, Ciaran — a keen photographer  — in August.

It was one of around 50 he took but it is also one of only a handful he selected for his family.

“We took them during lockdown and never planned to put them out on social media or anything,” Damien said.

“We thought we would use them at an appropriate time instead, and Tuesday’s hearing was that moment.” Having suffered a number of setbacks since February, Patricia was too unwell to attend the hearing.

Patricia Carrick. Picture: Ciarán MacChoncarraige

She was, at the time, being treated for an infection in University College Hospital Galway, where her care is now being managed by the Palliative Care Team.

Damien sat in the courtroom as counsel for the HSE Patrick Hanratty SC read out the apology on behalf of the HSE and the MedLab Pathology Ltd.

It stated: "The Health Service Executive and MedLab Pathology Ltd acknowledge the liquid-based cytology sample of May 31, 2016, was read in a manner that was negligent and in breach of duty.

“We wish to sincerely apologise that this occurred and for the consequences and distress that this has caused for you all.” 

He sighed, and quietly sobbed as the words echoed round the room.

“We should not have been dragged into court to have to have that said,” he said.

“The whole process has been extraordinarily stressful.

“It has added to all our suffering as if what Trish is going through is not sentence enough for the mistake that was made.

There is something so inherently cruel, and inhuman about dragging a dying woman into court for something that could have been handled so differently

He added: “Hearing those words and knowing the case was over has just been a huge weight off our shoulders.” 

When he and Patricia were interviewed by ABC News affiliate NTV back in 2017 — in what seems now a different era — they had no hint whatsoever of what was coming down the tracks.

They were a happy, go-lucky family who had had their trials and tribulations.

And as they settled onto their grassy patch among the crowd in Nebraska’s Grand Island for what was the first solar eclipse with the first path of totality to cross America since 1918, they couldn’t have been happier.

Indeed, for Patrica, it was a dream come true, and the fact that they ended up being interviewed for American TV helped seal the experience for them.

The introduction to the subsequent feature was read out by anchorman Steve White.

“Many call it a spiritual moment, pondering their place in the universe as the heavens bring people together,” he said of the solar phenomenon.

And while she may well have pondered her place in the universe at the time, she has been forced now to reevaluate everything —  but in very different circumstances.

Little could she have known that day in Nebraska that the clock had already started ticking on the amount of time she had left to spend with her family.

That solar eclipse is one of many memories she and her family now cherish.

She had planned to travel to America for two more solar eclipses, but those plans have now been put on hold.

“We don’t know how much longer she has left to live and we don’t want to know,” Damien says, his voice cracking with emotion.

“We live each day as it comes and we cherish every moment we have left with her.”