Health victim’s refusal to play blame game an example to HSE

When she found herself surrounded by journalists and microphones, she took the pressure off her friend by identifying herself as the patient, and then delivered a haiku of concentrated misery.

That’s women for you. Mná na hÉireann. Represented ably by just one of them. A woman from Offaly who, in her black coat with its furry collar, demonstrated the strengths of 10 claimed by the sisterhood, but rarely personified so neatly, so completely.

For starters, she’s a risk manager, this woman. Her mother died of breast cancer, so she knows her risk is genetically higher. Generations of mothers have known this and been derided when they swore to their kids — kids who were much more sophisticated and better educated than their mammies — that cancers run in families. The kids rolled their eyes to heaven and did a “Yeah, Ma, whatever”. When the scientists came around to precisely the same point, many older women silently rolled their eyes to heaven and did a “Nobody listens to me,” shrug.

The woman in the black overcoat knew her risk was higher by virtue of her mother’s experience. Therefore she – and her splendid nameless GP – took extra care. The way the HSE and the health educators generally would want them to. The GP sent her to hospital to get a mammogram. Just a check-up. To be sure, to be sure.

The mammogram had a shadow on it. So off she went to Portlaoise hospital for an ultrasound. Which, she was told, gave her the all-clear. Roll out the bunting. Break out the champagne.

Long after the hypothetical champagne bottle was turfed into the nearest bottle bank, the woman who got the all-clear was watching television. To be precise, it was two years after the putative bunting was rolled up and stored away. But, because she’s alert and takes responsibility for her own wellbeing (as the HSE and the health educators generally would want her to) when she watched TV, she registered a report that 97 women had been recalled. And took action.

She went back to her GP. Good judgment, rather than fight her way through helplines. Could she, the question to the GP went, could she be one of those women? The GP went to investigate.

Now, all of this was OTT, it could be suggested. The might of a bureaucracy had cranked into corrective action. Every one of the 97 women was going to be telephoned. Personally. Accordingly, there was no need for this woman or her GP to put their oar in. She was demonstrating an irrational fear that the HSE would fail, at a time when failure didn’t seem possible.

Over The Top it turned out not to be. An irrational fear it wasn’t. The bureaucracy failed to contact her. But her fussy protective GP came through once again. On the telephone. Quickly. With the bad news that — never mind whether or not the HSE had got its act together — she was definitely one of the people who needed to be re-examined by Professor Arnold Hill on Saturday.

So she turned up, with a friend. Good thinking. Offers of counsellors have been flying, in the last week or so, but there’s no support like that of a good friend in this kind of crisis. A good friend will cry with relief when the diagnosis is positive, take you to the nearest coffee shop, and fill you full of scones and gulping laughter that has an edge of survivor guilt to it. A good friend will walk with you in silence and make sure you get home safely — how ironic is that concept of safety in this context — if the diagnosis is negative.

Which, in the case of the woman in the black overcoat, it was. As it was for many of the other women who turned up with husbands, partners, mates and on their own on Saturday to hear what turned out to be the worst.

If the woman in the black overcoat, given her clear level of common sense, had been in charge of the operation, she might have made sure the private clinic was comfortably warm, so the waiting was less miserable for everybody concerned. She might also have made sure that the media were barred from the car park, so that patients coming to terms with what to many of them, in those initial shocking moments, must have felt like a death sentence, would not have to have this most private of tragedies exacerbated by swivelling cameras and shouted questions.

But nobody with her level of common sense had thought it through, and so, when she found herself surrounded by journalists and microphones, she took the pressure off her friend by identifying herself as the patient, and then delivered a speech of concentrated misery.

“They found something,” she said. “I have to go to Dublin tomorrow. They found something.”

Thick and fast came the invitations to blame someone, ideally the Minister for Health. The woman in the black overcoat didn’t take up the invitations. No, she responded, she didn’t feel angry at Mary Harney.

“I feel sorry for her, actually,” she added. “So I don’t want to say anything about her.”

What an object lesson in restraint and good sense. It might make readers and viewers feel better to witness an impassioned character assassination of Harney, since the “if it bleeds, it leads” axiom has recently been replaced by “if it weeps, it leads”.

But it wouldn’t make this sensible woman feel any better. And anyway, she had other priorities. Her family didn’t know about the diagnosis, so she wanted to go home and share it with them.

She did have time, however, to empathise with the other women back at the clinic, each, as she described it, waiting in silence. She also had time to praise the specialist who examined her. He was “very nice and gentle”.

This woman, in common with many of the others who attended that clinic on Saturday, is quietly heroic. No hysteria. No blame. No reproaches.

If she made a mistake, it was to give her name. Because she needs her privacy and will need it for a long time to come, while she copes with whatever the final diagnosis turns out to be, and with the side-effects of whatever treatment regimen is decided upon.

She doesn’t need anybody agitating for her to sue somebody, anybody, to get compensation for the two years in which needed treatment was not provided. She doesn’t need to become the personification of the minority of the 97 who will require continuing treatment. Indeed, she needs to be very wary of being painted into that representational role, lest she fall foul of what people with disabilities call the “Supercrip Syndrome,” whereby one individual with an illness or disability becomes the media-friendly representative of many others suffering the same challenges, who quickly come to resent the publicity given the high-profile individual.

That’s why, even though her name is known, this column won’t remind readers of it.

The point is simple. One woman, in shock and fear, managed to demonstrate empathy, respect for others and simple common sense.

It would be great if she infected the healthcare system with all three.