A woman who is terminally ill with bowel cancer believes she could have survived the disease if she had private health insurance and was able to have a colonoscopy earlier.
"Rosie" is 40 and says she has been told by doctors that she has as little as two years to live. She does not want her identity to be revealed because while her husband and her 18-year-old daughter are aware that her illness is terminal, her 13-year-old son is not.
In the summer of 2005 her doctor sent a letter to the local hospital requesting she be given a sonogram and colonoscopy after digestive complaints she had had for years worsened and she began to bleed. The sonogram diagnosed gallstones but the colonoscopy did not take place. She waited through the autumn and winter of 2005 but there was no word of a colonoscopy or when her gall bladder would be removed.
After Christmas 2005 she phoned the hospital and was told she was still on the list and would be called soon. She said she was in agony from November 2005 to the end of February 2006. On February 28th, 2006, four days after she turned 40, she was called for a colonoscopy, which found a tumour. She had surgery, which means she will carry a colostomy bag for the rest of her life.
She says she knows of a patient on private health insurance who got his colonoscopy within three days of the hospital's being informed that he had private health insurance.
Although she and her husband work, they cannot afford private health insurance.
"But even if we could have we wouldn't have gotten it because we believed . . . that all people should get good care despite their incomes. We thought jumping queues was wrong. We're socialists . . . just like Bertie. Ha Ha," she said in an e-mail sent on Monday night to Joe Duffy of RTÉ Radio One's Liveline programme.
Rosie told The Irish Times last night she is convinced her cancer would have been diagnosed sooner and treated successfully if she had private insurance.
She has been told the cancer has spread to her lungs. "Because it broke through the bowel I have been given two to four years from diagnosis to live. The chemo is to prolong life, not to save it. I have three years, tops, to go."
In her e-mail to Liveline she asked: "Should I blame anyone for my hard luck? I've thought about it over the last year and have tried to be reasonable about it.
"But today, when I heard that a very nice man who was in the same, if not worse condition, than me when he went to his GP is going to live because he had private health insurance and I'm going to die because I didn't, I had to bite my tongue. I'm happy he's going to live. He deserves to live. But so do I.
"The health service has been in the hands of Fianna Fáil and the PDs for years and all they can think to do is put resources into privatisation. They don't have the ability to change structures in the public sector that would put more resources towards patient care."
