I’ve been thinking a lot about Vicky Phelan’s time this week. Like a luscious oak quietly shedding one leaf at a time, we awoke one day to the shock that it was bare and gone.
mother, knowing she was being robbed of infinite precious memories not yet made, her time was precious to her. Vicky Phelan went to great lengths to beg, steal, and borrow more months and years, moments and minutes. But for a woman who had to work so hard to stay just a little longer, she gave so much of her time to others with the generosity of someone who had a lifetime to go.
There must have been people all over the country this week who sat down to read yet another message they got from Vicky Phelan. As a champion of the patient, it’s no surprise that many people who felt hurt by a health service that could seem cold and indifferent found themselves drawn to someone so warm, kind, righteous and brilliant. Perfect strangers would write to Vicky Phelan all the time asking her for help. A few years ago she told me that the volume of emails and messages was so great that she had started taking a day off each week to read and reply to as many as she could.
Many of these people, like them, were terminally ill. With time on her mind, she worked out her own little system where she would prioritize responding to those who didn’t have much left. Imagine that? A woman, at her computer or her phone, tries to organize the prayers and pleas of desperate strangers.
I am convinced that if this country continues to talk about Vicky forever – and I hope we do – we will still never know the true extent of what that woman has done for other people.
As someone who had learned to advocate for herself the hard way, she wanted to share the wealth of her knowledge and know-how. She would tell people about this clinical trial, that support group. All the while, she was weighed down with upset and anger as she read first hand how many people needed help.
“A lot of them are terminally ill people; no options given, no hope given,” Vicky had said at the time.
‘It’s terrible, isn’t it? If you think about it, these people feel like I’m the only person who can help them. I mean, what does that say about our country?”
She described, with real pain, how she wrote answers twice that people never got to read. Instead, patients’ loved ones had replied, explaining that the person who had originally written Vicky had since passed away. I am convinced that if this country continues to talk about Vicky forever – and I hope we do – we will never know the true extent of what that woman has done for other people.
There were so many things that made Vicky Phelan extraordinary. She was vibrant and brilliant. As Ryan Tubridy described her this week, she was someone too alive to die. The whole country adored her and she refused to let it change her. She was an incredibly eloquent and brilliant communicator, one who never asked to be a campaigner but was one of the best the nation has ever seen. For the sake of her legacy, and for the sake of her family and others, we must ensure that some things about Vicky Phelan remain extraordinary for very good reasons.
We have had such embarrassment from brilliant women and their families who have devoted their finite precious time to this country in recent years. The late Lynsey Bennett, Ruth Morrissey and Emma Mhic Mhathúna, and survivors and partners such as Stephen Teap, have all, like Vicky, given so much to a state that stole from them. There are simply too many heartbroken people in Ireland who, in their own goodness, have made it their own responsibility to correct this country’s mistakes.
Vicky Phelan didn’t like the power that publicity has over the healthcare system and politicians of this country. She had a soft spot for the fact that the HSE and the government seemed to respond faster and better to patients with a high profile. Far too often in Ireland, change only seems to follow someone making their pain public.
So it should be extraordinary to have a sick woman sitting in front of a computer, trying to help all these people on her own and becoming her own micro-health service. We cannot afford to let that become more commonplace. It is unfair to make those most affected by poor health care its saviors.
There are many of us who would have experienced what Vicky Phelan did and just turned in on ourselves. We would have felt that we had been through enough, that a public struggle for reform was too much – and that’s fair, and that’s right. But as we’re all thankful to know, sometimes there will be people in the world with rare diamonds like Vicky Phelan who are just too good, and just can’t live if they don’t make up for the wrong they’ve done. seen.
We need to make sure we don’t allow the Vicky Phelans of the world to keep running everything for us. There are plenty of people in high-powered, well-paid positions who should do that instead. When the malfunctioning weapons of state already take away so much from nice and good people, it is so wrong to take their precious time as well.