Post by thales on Oct 13, 2007 1:24:29 GMT -1
For one of my best friends and someone who was brave enough to change the health system in ireland...... Have a cheers for her 
Tribune Archive
'I will die within the next couple of months. I was hoping to live until my son finished school in three years, but it didn't work out'
Justine McCarthy
Print version Email to a friend
THE tiredness was gnawing inside her. She ached for sleep. Her mind was swamped with the vision of her bed at home, waiting for her. It was always like this after the chemo. It left her "wrecked" for three whole days.
It was dark by the time she got home that night last January. She went to her bedroom and kicked off her shoes. She flicked on the television and prepared to sink under the duvet, already surrendering to the balm of slumber. That was when she saw the public health advertisement filling the television screen.
Indignation spread to every extremity of her exhausted body.
"The earlier the diagnosis, the better your chances of survival, " an authoritative voice was warning, urging viewers not to delay, to go and get tested for bowel cancer.
She could not let it rest; would not allow herself to rest. What appalling, cruel hypocrisy. She reached for her mobile phone and tapped out a text message about the advertisement to RTE's Liveline. "If Bertie Ahern or Mary Harney or Michael McDowell were within reach (when I saw it) I would have killed them. Literally. I'm not joking, " she wrote. She said her name was Rosie; the name the midwife had mistakenly called her throughout the delivery of her two children, to her and her husband's giggling delight.
"Hello Rosie, " said Joe Duffy on the radio the next day. From her empty, silent home in Callan, Co Kilkenny, her children oblivious in the midst of their school labours, her husband teaching a computer class, and her own body begging for sleep, she announced to the nation that she was going to die because of hospital waiting lists.
Landmark phone call In that phone call, Rosie became a landmark. It was stuck-to-the-car-seat radio.
All around the country, citizens listened, petrified. Doctors were getting calls from colleagues and from home telling them to stop whatever they were doing and turn on the radio. She was telling how she had had to wait seven months for a colonoscopy after the request was made by her GP, how a delayed diagnosis of bowel cancer could be lethal, how the cancer had permeated her bowel and become incurable by the time she had the test, how she, a public patient, had sat beside the partner of a private patient with the same disease in a hospital room and heard how he had undergone the colonoscopy within three days of referral, and she was going to die.
Her eloquence and dignity and courage were spellbinding. An avalanche of letters swept through her letterbox in the days and weeks that followed. "Rosie, County Kilkenny", most of the envelopes were addressed. Somehow, they reached her. Thank you, they said in ballpoints weeping the personal tragedies of a myriad strangers. It was as if her bleak story had, at last, given an accessible narrative to the chaos and the callous unfairness impinging on hundreds of other patients and their families too.
Only one letter dissented. Waterfordpostmarked, it read: "Who do you think you are, making the people working in the hospital look like they don't do a good job? I suppose, when you die, Joe Duffy will play the interview again on the show."
"It upset me . . . for five minutes, " says Susie Long.
A long peal of ebullient laughter erupts from the chair where she sits propped up with a pillow behind her back. Her skin is glowing and without a line; the short, auburn hair luxuriant. You can tell by the way her fatigued body refuses to cooperate with the vitality of her words that she is very sick. She sits now beside a different bed, in a room of Our Lady's Hospice in Harold's Cross, where she moved to from Callan five weeks ago.
In response to a question about what gives her the inextinguishable valour that made her phone Liveline, she points to a photograph on her dressing table. It is a freeze-frame of her family's history, taken 19 years ago. Sitting in the foreground is Susie Long from Ohio with her newborn daughter, Aine, snuggling in her arms. Ranged behind them are Susie's mother, who suffered violence from her husband and died in a car crash 10 years ago, Susie's grandmother, who used to admonish her for trailing coal through the house after scrambling her motorbike on the fuel mountains at the local power station with her deceased brother, and Susie's great-grandmother.
"I suppose she's what made me what I am, " she says, indicating Sis Coyle, the oldest of the matriarchs, a secondgeneration Irish-American who died at the age of 91. "She was a Wobbly. She voted for Eugene Debs who founded the Industrial Workers of the World [and was a five-time socialist candidate for the US presidency]. She was strong."
Since Susie was diagnosed with terminal bowel cancer in March 2006, she has been treated with two different forms of chemotherapy and with antibodies, as well as undergoing three abdominal operations. "I had to try every option to prolong life, " she explains, "but, unhappily, it didn't work. The disease has spread very rapidly. I will die within the next couple of months. I was hoping to live until my son finished school in three years, but it didn't work out."
There is no self-pity in her voice and her eyes never brim with threatened tears, but the leaden tone of sadness is unmissable. If there is one thing Susie Long can say without contradiction it is that she has taken life by the scruff of the neck and lived it, virtually since the day she was born, 24 February 1966.
Now life is leaving her and she is "trying not to be angry". She asks rhetorically: "What can you do? You have to accept it. I am angry, though I don't rage. I've never had the poor-me syndrome. People get cancer and that's all there is to it. I'm in the sadness stage. I don't want to leave my children and my husband but I know that there is nothing that can be done for me. The closer I get to death, the sadder I am because I want more time with Conor and the kids. I live every day at a time. I'm grateful for every day because I know that today isn't the day."
Upped sticks for Ireland At 18, she upped sticks and left her dull, midwest American home town, equipped with a literary map drawn from the Irish history books and the Jennifer Johnston novels she devoured in her teens, pitching up in Dublin in search of excitement in 1984. She sold jewellery from a street stall and worked as a waitress in The Living Room behind Trinity College. At 20, she fell in love with Conor MacLiam, a secondary school teacher from Rathmines, and they were married.
They were twin souls with an unshakeable allegiance to the ideal of social justice. "We thought it was wrong to skip queues, " she replies when asked why they, a middle-class couple, did not have private health insurance. "We thought our tax should pay for our health system and everyone should be treated equally. When someone presents with obvious symptoms of cancer, they should be seen right away."
"If you could go back in time, would you go private?"
"No, " she says, closing her eyes as if to concentrate on her words. "It's wrong."
After her Liveline interview, the recently unseated socialist TD Joe Higgins invited Susie to Dail Eireann to witness a debate on the nation's cancer services. She brought her 14-year-old son, Fergus, with her after he pleaded to be allowed go. Together, they sat in the public gallery, separated by security plate glass from the politicians below and, as they sat there, Susie watched her youngest child grow angrier and angrier.
"He was disgusted. We were up high and we could see that Mary Harney was texting on her phone under the desk during the debate. Fergus is a very inquisitive boy. He questions everything."
Her babies were healthy from birth; Aine weighing in at eight pounds, her baby brother seven pounds heavier when he arrived five years later.
Their mother "puked for the first three months with both of them" but it did not deter her from embarking on her first fight with the Department of Health. Having given birth to Aine at home, in the house of her parents-in-law while she and Conor still resided in Dublin, she was determined her second child would start life in the same way. By then, the family had settled in Callan, led to the rural idyll by proselytising friend-of-the-earth Susie.
In 1988, Kilkenny did not have a homebirth policy then, and still does not today.
"I couldn't get a midwife. I fought the health board then too, " she says, emitting another spirited laugh. "In the end, Fergus was also born in his grandparents' house in Dublin. I don't like confrontation. No, really, I don't like causing trouble, but I always end up doing it. I knew I was going to raise my kids to question everything and to speak out when they saw injustice against the underdog. That's how I am."
A member of Amnesty International, a member of Earth Watch, an advocate for the Home Birth Association, Susie was a project worker with the Women's Refuge in Kilkenny (and running discos in her spare time to raise funds), until her illness made it no longer tenable. In a lifetime of striving to make a difference, it was her cancer that caused her to make her most significant and lasting contribution to the homeland she adopted at 18. She has never regretted choosing Ireland. "This country has been good to me, " she says. "I've made loads of friends and it's never been boring.
Ireland has been the best country in the world in the last 20 years."
Outrage She was outraged on discovering the reason for the seven-month delay in her diagnosis was a shortage of day beds in St Luke's Hospital and that the hospital staff had spent years beseeching the Department of Health for more day beds. Last May, she delivered a speech . . . watched by Conor, Aine and Fergus . . .
at a formal presentation in St Luke's of architects' plans for its new 24-bed Day Services Unit, which was given the initial nod by health minister Mary Harney, after Susie's Liveline interview. Within the last fortnight, the HSE has approved 100% funding for the 5m building, which will accommodate two procedure rooms.
"I was delighted that day, because something good has come out of a tragic situation. Getting cancer is tragic.
Hopefully, other people might live because of what I did. The hospital had been asking for a new unit for 16 years.
The one that's there has six or eight trolleys. There isn't even a toilet. I'm glad I did what I did. The new unit will cut down on the waiting list and I hope that what happened to me won't happen to other people. But the health service shouldn't be delivered by the media. It should be planned, state-of-the-art, focused on needs. People deserve the best care but you're not going to get it unless you fight for it. I'd love to see the unit completed, but that's not going to happen."
The day after the presentation, some of the nurses asked Susie if she would like to join the annual Ossory pilgrimage to Lourdes, after someone cancelled at the last moment. A devout Catholic when she arrived in Ireland 23 years ago only to have her faith eroded by church scandals, she thought: "I'd love to go to France." Aine went with her and, after politely attending the Ossory mass in Lourdes, they left the "holy trail for the tourist trail". Mother and daughter took a train up the Pyrenees to stroll around the mountains and drink in the fragrant May air, lingering in companionable quietude at cafe tables. "We had two good days, and then I got sick."
'I was in a lot of pain' At four o'clock on the morning of the third day, Susie came downstairs from her hotel room and requested the night porter to call a taxi to take her to hospital. "I was in a lot of pain, " she recalls.
"Within four hours, I was seen, had an MRI scan and was diagnosed. The tumour had spread to my uterus. The people in the hospital in France were lovely.
"The people who work in the Irish health service are wonderful too. I have been hearing about the errors in diagnosing breast cancer in the past week and I would be very slow to blame anyone because you don't know what kind of conditions their work is done in. I feel sorry for health service workers who are put under such strain to do a good job just because they are underfunded or there is a cock-up in how the service is organised. I would hate for one or two people to be made scapegoats when it's the system that failed."
On her return from France in May she had surgery to drain her uterus and lapsed into a coma. She remained unconscious in Waterford Regional Hospital for several weeks. "I woke up in the ICU unit thinking we had all been in a car crash and I was so afraid for the children and Conor."
Being without a religious faith, she finds, makes dying harder. "I would love to have a belief in religion because it makes you feel safe but, unfortunately, I just don't. I like the community of belonging to a church. I love Christmas and Christmas carols. I used to love singing them to my children. I've told Conor I want to be cremated and, maybe a week later, there would be a memorial service. I was a very strong Catholic until I moved to Ireland, " she laughs that rich laugh again, appreciating the irony. "I'm full of contradictions. That's what they said about Johnny Cash . . .
'partly truth, partly fiction, a walking contradiction'. Kris Kristofferson wrote that about him."
"You're a fan of Johnny Cash?"
She nods. "I've a tattoo of him on my back. Do you want to see?" and she slips her pyjama jacket off one shoulder to reveal an inky portrait of the country/rock star from Arkansas. "I had it done in Waterford, " she adds proudly.
Susie can no longer cook. It used to be a labour of love, involving lots of healthy "wholegrain this and wholegrain that".
(She was overweight before the cancer, but never smoked). Nor can she read the standard type size in novels any more . . . the great enduring passion of her life . . . since the medication started affecting her eyesight. But, in Our Lady's Hospice, where, she says, "I was lucky to get in, " she is learning about new pleasures.
"A woman comes around every Monday giving manicures. I've always been a tomboy because boys' stuff was so much more fun . . . but look at my nails, " she flashes all 10, each immaculately varnished in warm plum. "I've got girly nails for the first time in my life."
Her spacious, sunlit room pulsates with this extraordinary woman's joie de vivre. It visibly enlivens those around her. The banter of the hospice employee who comes to clean her en suite is full of affection for her. The dinner lady is joyous when Susie asks for pudding.
The nurse who comes in to administer an injection, whispers discreetly: "Did the earlier medicine help?" When the nurse leaves, Susie admits, under crossexamination, that she had been feeling unwell before the interview but that she had "popped a pill and felt much better".
"I just can't praise this place enough, " she says. "I feel safer here because help is at the end of a buzzer. When I was at home I had the homecare team and they were wonderful but it wasn't enough for what I needed. Conor has been so amazing. He looked after me so well when I came home from Waterford Hospital and I couldn't dress myself or bathe myself. He dressed and bathed me. Since I came here, he's been coming up every weekend. Now he's going to take leave from work so that he can be in Dublin all the time. I worry about Fergus. He's in second year in school. I want to spend as much time as I can with my kids but that's going to mean that he'll miss a lot of school. Aine is starting an arts degree in history and English in UCD. She's moving into her grandparents' place; the house where she was born. She's very quiet and very strong."
Then it is Susie's turn to stop talking.
She listens without a hint of vainglory trespassing her demeanour to the news that a commemorative plaque in her memory is being planned for the new Day Services Unit in St Luke's. Her eyes are closed, as she listens.
"Your children must be proud of you, " her visitor suggests.
She opens her eyes. They are undimmed. And she says: "I hope so."
'Susie will not be forgotten in St Luke's' "THE thing about Susie is she is so positive. She's dying, clearly, but everything about her is so positive. She's quite stunning, " says Dr Garry Courtney, consultant physician at St Luke's Hospital, Kilkenny.
"She was very committed to making sure that the delay she encountered in having a colonoscopy, which was done under the National Treatment Purchase Fund, wouldn't happen again. I would very definitely say that, because of what she has done, it is less likely to happen to someone else.
"The Department of Health sets a target that 50% of work in every hospital should be done on the basis of day care but, of the 317 beds in St Luke's Hospital, there are only six day care beds. Obviously, we failed Susie.
"The new unit will be state of the art with 24 couches or day beds, two procedure rooms, showers and toilets and consultation facilities. Susie gave a great speech the day the plans were presented last May. There were over a hundred people in the room, including her family and friends. 'Humbling' is a hackneyed word these days but it's the only one I can use to describe her. After the speeches, Susie visited the site in the grounds of St Luke's, studying the proposed facilities that she will never see.
"The design team for the building work is being appointed this month but from the outset it is planned to commemorate Susie in the building, with a plaque or, perhaps, a painting. She will not be forgotten in St Luke's."
'I will die within the next couple of months. I was hoping to live until my son finished school in three years, but it didn't work out'
Justine McCarthy
Print version Email to a friend
THE tiredness was gnawing inside her. She ached for sleep. Her mind was swamped with the vision of her bed at home, waiting for her. It was always like this after the chemo. It left her "wrecked" for three whole days.
It was dark by the time she got home that night last January. She went to her bedroom and kicked off her shoes. She flicked on the television and prepared to sink under the duvet, already surrendering to the balm of slumber. That was when she saw the public health advertisement filling the television screen.
Indignation spread to every extremity of her exhausted body.
"The earlier the diagnosis, the better your chances of survival, " an authoritative voice was warning, urging viewers not to delay, to go and get tested for bowel cancer.
She could not let it rest; would not allow herself to rest. What appalling, cruel hypocrisy. She reached for her mobile phone and tapped out a text message about the advertisement to RTE's Liveline. "If Bertie Ahern or Mary Harney or Michael McDowell were within reach (when I saw it) I would have killed them. Literally. I'm not joking, " she wrote. She said her name was Rosie; the name the midwife had mistakenly called her throughout the delivery of her two children, to her and her husband's giggling delight.
"Hello Rosie, " said Joe Duffy on the radio the next day. From her empty, silent home in Callan, Co Kilkenny, her children oblivious in the midst of their school labours, her husband teaching a computer class, and her own body begging for sleep, she announced to the nation that she was going to die because of hospital waiting lists.
Landmark phone call In that phone call, Rosie became a landmark. It was stuck-to-the-car-seat radio.
All around the country, citizens listened, petrified. Doctors were getting calls from colleagues and from home telling them to stop whatever they were doing and turn on the radio. She was telling how she had had to wait seven months for a colonoscopy after the request was made by her GP, how a delayed diagnosis of bowel cancer could be lethal, how the cancer had permeated her bowel and become incurable by the time she had the test, how she, a public patient, had sat beside the partner of a private patient with the same disease in a hospital room and heard how he had undergone the colonoscopy within three days of referral, and she was going to die.
Her eloquence and dignity and courage were spellbinding. An avalanche of letters swept through her letterbox in the days and weeks that followed. "Rosie, County Kilkenny", most of the envelopes were addressed. Somehow, they reached her. Thank you, they said in ballpoints weeping the personal tragedies of a myriad strangers. It was as if her bleak story had, at last, given an accessible narrative to the chaos and the callous unfairness impinging on hundreds of other patients and their families too.
Only one letter dissented. Waterfordpostmarked, it read: "Who do you think you are, making the people working in the hospital look like they don't do a good job? I suppose, when you die, Joe Duffy will play the interview again on the show."
"It upset me . . . for five minutes, " says Susie Long.
A long peal of ebullient laughter erupts from the chair where she sits propped up with a pillow behind her back. Her skin is glowing and without a line; the short, auburn hair luxuriant. You can tell by the way her fatigued body refuses to cooperate with the vitality of her words that she is very sick. She sits now beside a different bed, in a room of Our Lady's Hospice in Harold's Cross, where she moved to from Callan five weeks ago.
In response to a question about what gives her the inextinguishable valour that made her phone Liveline, she points to a photograph on her dressing table. It is a freeze-frame of her family's history, taken 19 years ago. Sitting in the foreground is Susie Long from Ohio with her newborn daughter, Aine, snuggling in her arms. Ranged behind them are Susie's mother, who suffered violence from her husband and died in a car crash 10 years ago, Susie's grandmother, who used to admonish her for trailing coal through the house after scrambling her motorbike on the fuel mountains at the local power station with her deceased brother, and Susie's great-grandmother.
"I suppose she's what made me what I am, " she says, indicating Sis Coyle, the oldest of the matriarchs, a secondgeneration Irish-American who died at the age of 91. "She was a Wobbly. She voted for Eugene Debs who founded the Industrial Workers of the World [and was a five-time socialist candidate for the US presidency]. She was strong."
Since Susie was diagnosed with terminal bowel cancer in March 2006, she has been treated with two different forms of chemotherapy and with antibodies, as well as undergoing three abdominal operations. "I had to try every option to prolong life, " she explains, "but, unhappily, it didn't work. The disease has spread very rapidly. I will die within the next couple of months. I was hoping to live until my son finished school in three years, but it didn't work out."
There is no self-pity in her voice and her eyes never brim with threatened tears, but the leaden tone of sadness is unmissable. If there is one thing Susie Long can say without contradiction it is that she has taken life by the scruff of the neck and lived it, virtually since the day she was born, 24 February 1966.
Now life is leaving her and she is "trying not to be angry". She asks rhetorically: "What can you do? You have to accept it. I am angry, though I don't rage. I've never had the poor-me syndrome. People get cancer and that's all there is to it. I'm in the sadness stage. I don't want to leave my children and my husband but I know that there is nothing that can be done for me. The closer I get to death, the sadder I am because I want more time with Conor and the kids. I live every day at a time. I'm grateful for every day because I know that today isn't the day."
Upped sticks for Ireland At 18, she upped sticks and left her dull, midwest American home town, equipped with a literary map drawn from the Irish history books and the Jennifer Johnston novels she devoured in her teens, pitching up in Dublin in search of excitement in 1984. She sold jewellery from a street stall and worked as a waitress in The Living Room behind Trinity College. At 20, she fell in love with Conor MacLiam, a secondary school teacher from Rathmines, and they were married.
They were twin souls with an unshakeable allegiance to the ideal of social justice. "We thought it was wrong to skip queues, " she replies when asked why they, a middle-class couple, did not have private health insurance. "We thought our tax should pay for our health system and everyone should be treated equally. When someone presents with obvious symptoms of cancer, they should be seen right away."
"If you could go back in time, would you go private?"
"No, " she says, closing her eyes as if to concentrate on her words. "It's wrong."
After her Liveline interview, the recently unseated socialist TD Joe Higgins invited Susie to Dail Eireann to witness a debate on the nation's cancer services. She brought her 14-year-old son, Fergus, with her after he pleaded to be allowed go. Together, they sat in the public gallery, separated by security plate glass from the politicians below and, as they sat there, Susie watched her youngest child grow angrier and angrier.
"He was disgusted. We were up high and we could see that Mary Harney was texting on her phone under the desk during the debate. Fergus is a very inquisitive boy. He questions everything."
Her babies were healthy from birth; Aine weighing in at eight pounds, her baby brother seven pounds heavier when he arrived five years later.
Their mother "puked for the first three months with both of them" but it did not deter her from embarking on her first fight with the Department of Health. Having given birth to Aine at home, in the house of her parents-in-law while she and Conor still resided in Dublin, she was determined her second child would start life in the same way. By then, the family had settled in Callan, led to the rural idyll by proselytising friend-of-the-earth Susie.
In 1988, Kilkenny did not have a homebirth policy then, and still does not today.
"I couldn't get a midwife. I fought the health board then too, " she says, emitting another spirited laugh. "In the end, Fergus was also born in his grandparents' house in Dublin. I don't like confrontation. No, really, I don't like causing trouble, but I always end up doing it. I knew I was going to raise my kids to question everything and to speak out when they saw injustice against the underdog. That's how I am."
A member of Amnesty International, a member of Earth Watch, an advocate for the Home Birth Association, Susie was a project worker with the Women's Refuge in Kilkenny (and running discos in her spare time to raise funds), until her illness made it no longer tenable. In a lifetime of striving to make a difference, it was her cancer that caused her to make her most significant and lasting contribution to the homeland she adopted at 18. She has never regretted choosing Ireland. "This country has been good to me, " she says. "I've made loads of friends and it's never been boring.
Ireland has been the best country in the world in the last 20 years."
Outrage She was outraged on discovering the reason for the seven-month delay in her diagnosis was a shortage of day beds in St Luke's Hospital and that the hospital staff had spent years beseeching the Department of Health for more day beds. Last May, she delivered a speech . . . watched by Conor, Aine and Fergus . . .
at a formal presentation in St Luke's of architects' plans for its new 24-bed Day Services Unit, which was given the initial nod by health minister Mary Harney, after Susie's Liveline interview. Within the last fortnight, the HSE has approved 100% funding for the 5m building, which will accommodate two procedure rooms.
"I was delighted that day, because something good has come out of a tragic situation. Getting cancer is tragic.
Hopefully, other people might live because of what I did. The hospital had been asking for a new unit for 16 years.
The one that's there has six or eight trolleys. There isn't even a toilet. I'm glad I did what I did. The new unit will cut down on the waiting list and I hope that what happened to me won't happen to other people. But the health service shouldn't be delivered by the media. It should be planned, state-of-the-art, focused on needs. People deserve the best care but you're not going to get it unless you fight for it. I'd love to see the unit completed, but that's not going to happen."
The day after the presentation, some of the nurses asked Susie if she would like to join the annual Ossory pilgrimage to Lourdes, after someone cancelled at the last moment. A devout Catholic when she arrived in Ireland 23 years ago only to have her faith eroded by church scandals, she thought: "I'd love to go to France." Aine went with her and, after politely attending the Ossory mass in Lourdes, they left the "holy trail for the tourist trail". Mother and daughter took a train up the Pyrenees to stroll around the mountains and drink in the fragrant May air, lingering in companionable quietude at cafe tables. "We had two good days, and then I got sick."
'I was in a lot of pain' At four o'clock on the morning of the third day, Susie came downstairs from her hotel room and requested the night porter to call a taxi to take her to hospital. "I was in a lot of pain, " she recalls.
"Within four hours, I was seen, had an MRI scan and was diagnosed. The tumour had spread to my uterus. The people in the hospital in France were lovely.
"The people who work in the Irish health service are wonderful too. I have been hearing about the errors in diagnosing breast cancer in the past week and I would be very slow to blame anyone because you don't know what kind of conditions their work is done in. I feel sorry for health service workers who are put under such strain to do a good job just because they are underfunded or there is a cock-up in how the service is organised. I would hate for one or two people to be made scapegoats when it's the system that failed."
On her return from France in May she had surgery to drain her uterus and lapsed into a coma. She remained unconscious in Waterford Regional Hospital for several weeks. "I woke up in the ICU unit thinking we had all been in a car crash and I was so afraid for the children and Conor."
Being without a religious faith, she finds, makes dying harder. "I would love to have a belief in religion because it makes you feel safe but, unfortunately, I just don't. I like the community of belonging to a church. I love Christmas and Christmas carols. I used to love singing them to my children. I've told Conor I want to be cremated and, maybe a week later, there would be a memorial service. I was a very strong Catholic until I moved to Ireland, " she laughs that rich laugh again, appreciating the irony. "I'm full of contradictions. That's what they said about Johnny Cash . . .
'partly truth, partly fiction, a walking contradiction'. Kris Kristofferson wrote that about him."
"You're a fan of Johnny Cash?"
She nods. "I've a tattoo of him on my back. Do you want to see?" and she slips her pyjama jacket off one shoulder to reveal an inky portrait of the country/rock star from Arkansas. "I had it done in Waterford, " she adds proudly.
Susie can no longer cook. It used to be a labour of love, involving lots of healthy "wholegrain this and wholegrain that".
(She was overweight before the cancer, but never smoked). Nor can she read the standard type size in novels any more . . . the great enduring passion of her life . . . since the medication started affecting her eyesight. But, in Our Lady's Hospice, where, she says, "I was lucky to get in, " she is learning about new pleasures.
"A woman comes around every Monday giving manicures. I've always been a tomboy because boys' stuff was so much more fun . . . but look at my nails, " she flashes all 10, each immaculately varnished in warm plum. "I've got girly nails for the first time in my life."
Her spacious, sunlit room pulsates with this extraordinary woman's joie de vivre. It visibly enlivens those around her. The banter of the hospice employee who comes to clean her en suite is full of affection for her. The dinner lady is joyous when Susie asks for pudding.
The nurse who comes in to administer an injection, whispers discreetly: "Did the earlier medicine help?" When the nurse leaves, Susie admits, under crossexamination, that she had been feeling unwell before the interview but that she had "popped a pill and felt much better".
"I just can't praise this place enough, " she says. "I feel safer here because help is at the end of a buzzer. When I was at home I had the homecare team and they were wonderful but it wasn't enough for what I needed. Conor has been so amazing. He looked after me so well when I came home from Waterford Hospital and I couldn't dress myself or bathe myself. He dressed and bathed me. Since I came here, he's been coming up every weekend. Now he's going to take leave from work so that he can be in Dublin all the time. I worry about Fergus. He's in second year in school. I want to spend as much time as I can with my kids but that's going to mean that he'll miss a lot of school. Aine is starting an arts degree in history and English in UCD. She's moving into her grandparents' place; the house where she was born. She's very quiet and very strong."
Then it is Susie's turn to stop talking.
She listens without a hint of vainglory trespassing her demeanour to the news that a commemorative plaque in her memory is being planned for the new Day Services Unit in St Luke's. Her eyes are closed, as she listens.
"Your children must be proud of you, " her visitor suggests.
She opens her eyes. They are undimmed. And she says: "I hope so."
'Susie will not be forgotten in St Luke's' "THE thing about Susie is she is so positive. She's dying, clearly, but everything about her is so positive. She's quite stunning, " says Dr Garry Courtney, consultant physician at St Luke's Hospital, Kilkenny.
"She was very committed to making sure that the delay she encountered in having a colonoscopy, which was done under the National Treatment Purchase Fund, wouldn't happen again. I would very definitely say that, because of what she has done, it is less likely to happen to someone else.
"The Department of Health sets a target that 50% of work in every hospital should be done on the basis of day care but, of the 317 beds in St Luke's Hospital, there are only six day care beds. Obviously, we failed Susie.
"The new unit will be state of the art with 24 couches or day beds, two procedure rooms, showers and toilets and consultation facilities. Susie gave a great speech the day the plans were presented last May. There were over a hundred people in the room, including her family and friends. 'Humbling' is a hackneyed word these days but it's the only one I can use to describe her. After the speeches, Susie visited the site in the grounds of St Luke's, studying the proposed facilities that she will never see.
"The design team for the building work is being appointed this month but from the outset it is planned to commemorate Susie in the building, with a plaque or, perhaps, a painting. She will not be forgotten in St Luke's."
