Woman's Hour - My Best Day - Suzanne Goldberg on the power of laughter

Episode Date: September 16, 2019

Earlier in the summer we asked you, our listeners, to get in touch and send us a picture that somehow captured you at your best. Not just looking your best, but feeling your best. Hundreds of you got in touch with pictures of your best day, and we’ll be running as many of your stories as we can. Today…. Suzanne Goldberg brings us a picture of laughter.With continuing division over Brexit in Parliament and a General Election expected soon, the Liberal Democrat party’s president, Baroness Sal Brinton, joins us from the Lib Dem Party Conference. What opportunity does the current chaos offer the party and what is their message to women? Vicky Phelan has become one of the most well-known and well-respected women in Ireland. She exposed a medical scandal which not only affected her but affected over 200 other Irish women as well. She found out that cervical smear tests, like hers, were mistakenly given the all clear but turned out to be abnormal. This meant women weren’t given important treatment that might have prevented cancer or halted it. Vicky took her case to court and won. She was awarded 2.5 million Euros in compensation. Vicky is now living with a terminal prognosis but getting treatment. She says she’s feeling strong at the moment. She’s just published a book called Overcoming: A Memoir. What does it mean to be a woman in the 21st century? Anna Hope’s third novel, Expectation, opens with three young women in their twenties, living a precarious but happy life in a rented house in Hackney, London. Ten years on they are not where they had hoped to be. Anna joins Jane to discuss friendship, love, the pain of infertility, motherhood, work and feminism.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. I'm Natalia Melman-Petrozzella, and from the BBC, this is Extreme Peak Danger. The most beautiful mountain in the world. If you die on the mountain, you stay on the mountain. This is the story of what happened when 11 climbers died on one of the world's deadliest mountains, K2, and of the risks we'll take to feel truly alive. If I tell all the details, you won't believe it anymore. Extreme, peak danger. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hi, this is Jane Garvey and this is the Woman's Hour podcast. It's the 16th of September 2019. Some interesting women on the programme today, not least the Irish campaigner Vicky Phelan, the woman who exposed the country's cervical smear test scandal, and she is on the programme today. Also, the fantastic novelist Anna Hope

will be here to talk about her new book, Expectation. It's about young women's hopes and dreams and what becomes of those hopes and dreams. And we can hear too from our listener, Suzanne Goldberg, about the image of her that captures her at her best. And it's a lovely photograph, actually. You can see it on our website. She's laughing, but there's a story behind that and it's well worth hearing. And you will on the programme today. Let's head then to Bournemouth and the seaside. It is a beautiful day, apparently, in Bournemouth. The Liberal Democrat Conference is there, of course. And the party's policy on Brexit just couldn't be clearer. They don't want it. A vote for them in a general election is a vote to remain. The Lib Dems now do have 18 MPs and more defections are highly likely this week, we're told. Well, the president of the party is Baroness Sal Brinton. Sal, good morning to you.

Good morning, Jane. So the party's in good form and good spirits this week. It is. We have record numbers of members attending the conference and the atmosphere is really positive and upbeat. And I have to say that the success we had in the local elections and in the European elections, giving us our largest number of MEPs ever, has just helped to build the confidence back in the party. But I think it's also we're now seeing very clearly that we are sustaining 20% in the polls and against all the odds, all the pundits said, you'll drop back, you'll disappear. We aren't. And we are now being taken as seriously as we know we are there fighting to stop Brexit. Well, I've already said it. Your policy just couldn't be any plainer. You are the Remain

party and you've been absolutely consistent on that. No one can argue with that. However, it's not actually a democratic policy, is it? Well, if we are able to implement it, it would be. Just let me explain. Hang on, Jane, just let me explain. Joe is very clear, Joe Swinson is very clear that if we remain in the mess that we are at the moment, we need a democratic mechanism. We still would fight for a people's vote if there's going to be a vote. And if there's a people's vote, we will fight for remain. However, if we win a majority government, then our mandate to go into that government will have been fighting to revoke Article 50 and to stay in the EU.

So it's a two stage process, but we are very, very clear that the time has now come to call out the Prime Minister and his colleagues on heading towards a no-deal Brexit which would be disastrous for the country. But the country voted to leave the European Union. It did that in 2016 without the detail of what was going to happen. And the government's own Yellowhammer document, which they finally published last week under pressure, demonstrates the risk to our economy and to our society. And frankly, I'm with John Maynard Keynes, who said, when the facts change, I change my view.

And I'm afraid that in this country, we do not make one decision on something forever. The facts have changed. The people need a say. If it's through a referendum and a people's vote, that's fine. If it's a general election, the Liberal Democrats will fight to stop Brexit. What will you do, though, if we've already left the European Union before the general election? If we leave without a people's vote, I mean, I don't think it's going to go well at all for the current government. No, just the question as to what the Liberal Democrat policy will be if the next general election is fought after we have left the European Union. Well, apart from the important domestic issues, but on the Brexit issue, we will be saying that there is still a place to look at how we work with the European Union.

And in the longer term, it's not something you can just walk back into the next day. We would want to make sure that as a party we were setting out why a good relationship with the EU, whether it's partial through something like EFTA or a whole one coming back. We would absolutely want to say that. We think leaving the EU is going to be catastrophic. But you would be prepared to risk enormous discord in the country, huge upheaval, and campaign to re-enter the organisation after we've left? I think there is already discord, and we know from the polls at the moment about remain

and leave that if there is a people's vote, actually, the public view has already changed. And there's a extremely strong chance on the current polling that a remain vote would win a people's vote. Yes, there would be division. And you know, I applaud the work that the Women's Hour have done to start talking about culture and dialogue in Brexit. But we are a divided country. I think people will be horrified when they if Yellowhammer comes to be and they see food prices going up by 30 percent, women tend to buy the weekly shop. They will be the most at risk from having to pay those increased costs. You're adamant, are you, that women would suffer more in the event of a Brexit on October 31st, with or without a deal? Yes, because we also know, don't we, that unfortunately women tend to be in lower paid jobs, in part-time contracts, in zero-hour contracts.

And if we end up with the economy suffering, those are the first jobs to go. So I'm afraid women will be more affected. Let's listen, if you don't mind, together to this woman. She lives in North Devon. She was on Radio 4 over the weekend, on the programme The World this weekend, yesterday in fact. So she's in the West Country, which is traditionally Lib Dem country, and here she is telling the reporter why she voted leave. When we voted leave, we're not thick. We thought we were going to leave. End of story. No deals, no nothing. We weren't stupid, as they would like to say that us public are. We're all

very clued up, actually. What do you say to women like that, Sal? We do not say that anyone who voted Leave is stupid. We say they were misled by the people who ran the Leave campaign. And that has become more and more apparent. Think about some of the big poster ads with the trails of people that looked as if there was a threat of people being able to come into the country. That's the sort of thing that people believed they would stop with Brexit.

It's just not true. Effectively, what you're saying is, no, you're not stupid, but you were a bit gullible. main side called them out. We were told that it was Project Fear. And unfortunately, it was not Project Fear. And Boris Johnson, having led that leave campaign, has had to publish a document, the Yellowhammer document, that has actually showed that all the things we were concerned about, the government is now preparing for. The facts have changed. I think people, as they start to realise that, will also understand they were sold a duff story. Well, your leader, Jo Swinson, says, frankly, she doesn't rate Mr Johnson or Mr Corbyn. Neither of them are fit to be prime minister. Who would she work with?

Well, I think she's made it clear in the discussions in Parliament that if there's a government of national unity, which might be an option as all the people who are concerned about the democratic mandate, whether it's a people's vote or remain. So I think, you know, she's talked publicly about people like Ken Clark, people like Harriet Harman, people like Yvette Cooper from from both sides of the of the House. She's not she's not, by the way, talking about herself. She understands it needs to be led by somebody from one of the two main parties in order to bring together Remainers and people who want the people vote. This is a large group of MPs who do not want us to crash out on the 31st of October. So she wouldn't work with Jeremy Corbyn. He's the problem. But if Labour were led by Keir Starmer or somebody else, then that's a real possibility.

Well, I can't speak for Joe because clearly Jeremy, the problem is Jeremy Corbyn is clearly in favour of Brexit and his party are therefore clearly in favour of Brexit when they go through the lobbies. I know many, many Labour members who are coming over to the Liberal Democrats because they don't like Jeremy Corbyn's line. It's one of the reasons our membership is growing very, very fast is we're getting people from both the Conservative and Labour parties. Unfortunately, the Labour Party likes to portray that, you know, Jeremy Corbyn is much softer on Brexit. He isn't. His heart is in Brexit. And that's why Jo says she cannot work with him as Prime Minister. But it's by no means an impossibility that she would work with a Labour Party led by somebody else.

Let's be clear about that. Well, Jo is very clear. As a matter of principle, she's here for a different style of progressive policies. And the fact that she's already talking to MPs from all parties signifies that. So, I mean, whoever leads a future Labour Party, whoever leads a future Conservative Party, if they share our values, Joe will talk to them. You've got some new MPs, a lot actually. In fact, the names are Luciana Berger, Sarah, Sarah Wollaston is interesting because I'm so old I can remember when she was a leaver. Then she became a Tory Remainer and now she's a Liberal Democrat. I think most of the new

MPs who've joined us have started a journey where they realised the party that they were with had moved away from their values. Sarah speaks very movingly about this. She then moved to Change UK and she realised very swiftly that actually Change UK itself was not going to change the UK and she's joined us and we are delighted. And I have to say that having talked to Sarah and I've talked to our members down in her local party, they are working together really well for her community in Totnes. You've also got Philip Lee and his views on, for example, equal marriage have been pointed out as perhaps being not especially liberal in the past,

but you're welcoming him as well. Well, Philip's views on equal marriage are actually quite nuanced. He is, interestingly, in favour of the French system of civil registration for marriage for everybody, regardless of sexuality. And that's actually quite liberal. Well, OK, maybe I'll let you have it. There is no doubt as well that there is toxicity in this debate. I've really been struck by that. You only have to look at social media for 25 seconds, frankly, to grasp that.

Women in particular get it, don't they? They really are. Luciana Berger is an appalling example of exactly that. Does that really concern you? Yes, it really does. As the president of the party, I'm the chair of the party and all the chairs of the political parties in Westminster are working with the Joe Cox Foundation and the Committee for Standards in Public Life. And we're not there to say it's dreadful what's happening to our parliamentarians. We're there to say how we will stop our members intimidating candidates and

parliamentarians of other parties. And I really welcome that. And as a party, the party's federal board has absolutely supported that. We make sure that our social media guidance for our own members absolutely does not allow anyone to say that. And we will move to suspend quickly if it happens. Have you suspended anybody or expelled anyone? Oh, yes, of course we have. And indeed, you know, we've been doing so over the years because like every single party, we have people who say either stupid things or I'm afraid worse. They can say things that are harassing or completely inappropriate,

and we will take action. It is inappropriate. If those are not the party's values, then the discipline process for the party will swiftly follow. All of which sounds extremely strong, and I'd expect you to, but there is the issue of Lord Renard and the accusations against him. He was accused of pestering women. I think that's the best way of describing it. He does deny the allegations. Is he at the conference? I haven't seen him, actually, so I don't think he is. But you would acknowledge that perhaps that entire situation could have been dealt with rather better? Oh, you are so right. And as a result, not just of that, but of various other things, we started to revise our discipline process it was my main campaign to become president in 2014 our new discipline process which includes a very special

section on how we handle sexual harassment came into force alongside that last year so it's it's absolutely something the party has taken very seriously we have learnt from not having a particularly strong system. And without, I can't say anything about the old case because, you know, it's done and dusted, but we would not, absolutely not tolerate sexual harassment at all in the party. What about your history in terms of the coalition government? There's been lots of bold talk from Joe Swinson, and I don't blame her about becoming prime minister, but some cynics are saying that the idea that the Liberal Democrats could lead a government is a sort of neat way of trying to distract everybody from their memories of their part in the coalition government. What do you say about that?

Oh, not at all. Look, there are things in the coalition government which we did under protest, because if you remember the coalition was there because of the mess that the country was left in by the previous Labour government so there were things that we had to do that we weren't happy about but we did them at the time but there are many things in the coalition government of which we are proud including Jo's parental leave allowances, the way she has changed the way Parliament works, the insistence that the top companies now publish a gender pay gap, and that we want to expand that to the next tier of large

companies. All of those things absolutely speak to where we are at the moment. But then other people scream bedroom tax and tuition fees. Well, tuition fees, Nick Clegg apologised for a long time ago, and that was something that was undoubtedly an error we should not have done what we did and unfortunately it's there but actually if you talk to young people now they feel much more let down by the current government and Brexit particularly those who didn't get a vote in the referendum

It's hard to get away from the fact that Mr Clegg, as we speak, is, well, I'm not sure what time of day it is in Silicon Valley, but there he is earning squillions at Facebook. What do young women perhaps about to start their university careers? What do they make of the Liberal Democrats and their role in tuition fees? Well, when we did the deal on tuition fees, we insisted on grants for the poorest students. The moment the coalition broke up, the Tories scrapped those grants. So actually, we had tried to protect some of the young women who would be going to the university, perhaps the first person in their family going to the university. And we also had pegged the interest rate on the repayment of fees. And unfortunately, the Conservative government under Cameron and under May scrapped those. And actually,

the position that students find themselves in now is much, much worse than it was under coalition. Thank you very much. That's the view of Baroness Sal Brinton, who's the president of the Liberal Democrats. It's their conference in Bournemouth over the next couple of days. Tomorrow, we're going to be hearing from female representatives of the Brexit Party. I should say they're not actually having a conference as such, but a series of events. And in fact, I was at one in Southport on Friday night and some interesting conversations there. And you can hear some of them on Women's Hour tomorrow. Now, Expectation is the third novel by a great writer called Anna Hope. It's a contemporary tale of three women,

friends from childhood and university, and we meet them at various ages between 12 and 44. The book opens with them as young women living together in their 20s. It's a precarious, but it's a very happy life in a rented home in North London. Ten years on, and they're not quite where they might have hoped to be. Lyssa is a struggling actress, Kate is isolated and has a young child and Hannah has a successful career but she can't get pregnant. Anna started writing this in the

early stages of motherhood when her own baby was just five months old. I asked her if she'd put herself into all three of these women. Yeah, I've been all of these women at different points in my life. Up until my mid-30s, I definitely wasn't the one with the successful career. I was a struggling actress and I was working in call centres and life modelling, as Lissa does, and struggling, starting to write, but struggling to carve out the time. And yes, I struggled to get pregnant for many, many years. And then as I was writing it, I was learning what it is to be a new mother.

And so I was pouring all of that into the book. And so a lot of Kate's story, I was writing sort of day by day, really. Can I just ask, I hope it's not an impertinent, but it is a practical question. When you've got a five-month-old baby, how do you go about the business of writing a book? Do you know, we've got Woman's Hour to thank for that

because my husband was commuting to work and he heard Woman's Hour and you were doing a segment on shared parental leave and we hadn't heard about it and he said, check out shared parental leave. And it had just come in and he managed to get nine months off his academic job. And so we were together, he had nine months off work and we were uh living in wales we'd left london to go to rural wales right okay i'm now really glad i asked the question um because i don't honestly see how anybody with a five-month-old baby can

carve out the hours or have the energy to write when you do well there we go okay i do wish i hope that young women read this book, not least because the book, as I say, it does travel through time and we hear from and witness the lives of our three characters at various stages. But you absolutely nail the isolation of the early years of motherhood,

which can be, for your character, Kate, in this book, just utterly brutal. Yes. Do you know what's really interesting is that some of the most sort of engaged responses have been from women in their mid to late 20s. And part of me thought, gosh, really? Because it's not always the most kind of positive picture of getting to this age and stage. But women have said to me, I'm already feeling that pressure at the age of 27, 28. My friends are already getting married, talking about having kids. I'm already feeling like I'm failing.

And I think it's that, isn't it? It's that feeling that we're not measuring up to some standard of womanhood, of success, of whatever it may be. And where, you know, where was that standard? I thought of it like this sort of, you know, this fantasy creature that we create at some point in our early lives and imagine that we're going to be when we get to whatever it is, 30, 35. Of course, reality is just not that.

No, and on the face of it, though, this generation, your generation, did have everything, had the potential to be whatever you wanted. I think that that really came to me really starkly as I wrote the book. It's like, you know, my generation was a generation that came of age, thinking that we could have it all. You know, there's a line where the mother who's been a kind of feminist... This is Lissa's mother. Lissa's mother, you know, says to Lissa, you know, we got out there and we changed the world for you. And what have you done with it? And I think, you know, that really did come home to me as I was

writing the book. What have I, you know, I'll speak for myself, what have I done with it? You know, and I felt as though my concerns had become very, very personal, very, very kind of self-absorbed. And it was only as I was writing the book that I thought, my goodness, you know, what is the legacy? What is my legacy? What is the legacy of my generation politically? And it's a hard question actually to to think about and and to answer personally i have become much much more engaged in activism uh since writing the book um was your mother an activist yes well she was in her in her own way um she was very involved in cnd um when i was about eight so that was 1982 which i think you know, for anybody that was a child in that time, you know, it felt like we're alive in that time.

It felt as though nuclear war was very, very close. And certainly our house was littered with leaflets giving information about nuclear blasts and what the sort of damage would be. You know, I became really kind of quite anxious, I think, as a child, you know, thinking about the threat of nuclear war. And a lot of that has gone into the character of Sarah in the book she's more of a Greenham woman than my mum was we went to Greenham with my mum but my mum wasn't at Greenham but yeah

she was very involved in local CND. It is a complicated relationship in your book between Lissa and Sarah her mum because they are both a bit disappointed in each other aren't they they are yeah they absolutely are i mean i mean sarah is a painter um and um and an activist and and she's somebody that has really um i think while she's been a mother and given lisa everything that she she thought lisa needed And, you know, Sarah has followed her own career. Lyssa has felt that she hasn't had the love that she wanted from her mother. And so there's a sense in which they're estranged from each other.

And yeah, as you say, both a little bit disappointed in the other. I think in many ways it became one of the relationships that most interested me as I wrote through the book, that sort of intergenerational conversation about feminism and about what my generation has done with, but, you know, as they say that, I don't want to do my generation down, you know, because I feel as though we've also done our best, you know, that the idea that we, particularly, I'd say in the realm of fertility, that we thought the narrative was that we particularly I'd say in the realm of fertility that we thought the narrative was that we could delay fertility and have our careers and then when we get to sort of 34 35 and realize that

it may not be that easy I think there's an awful sense of sort of guilt that we have yeah it's infinitely more complex I think than simple narratives allow but but the brutal truth is it is easier to get pregnant in your 20s. Yeah. It just is. And I don't know whether, do you think we ought to start changing the conversation and just be utterly frank about it? Yeah, but in doing that, we need to change the conversation about our working lives. And that's a huge conversation. And we can't just tell women in their 20s that they ought to be getting pregnant because women in their 20s you know they're in such a sort of precarious financial situation I mean there's a reality that many many men are not ready to have children in their 20s in their in their early 30s and their mid 30s.

The conversation is often missed out. Yeah yeah yeah we have to resist these simple narratives yeah if we can make it easier for women in their 20s to have children then great but let's not just you know beat women in their 20s over the heads and tails. They've got to get pregnant. The other really important thread in the book, which we must acknowledge, is the importance of friendship, is the fact that people who meet perhaps at school or at university do keep in touch. I have great friendships that have lasted, you know, from school until now. And, you know, the depth of conversation, the depth of knowing that have lasted, you know, from school until now. And, you know, the depth of

conversation, the depth of knowing that we have, but also the capacity to just kind of trigger each other is extraordinary. I mean, what I do want to say about a female friendship is that actually my female friends are really some of the greatest treasures of my life. And although I've written a novel in which that friendship is kind of complicated, I hope that, you know, within that is just a sense in which, you know, these friendships are the friendships that will save us in the end. The women are there, you know,

when the men may have gone, the women are there. And certainly when I've had my most difficult times, it's been women that have got me through. Actually, the book opens with the three characters lissa and kate and hannah all living together yeah in a um i mean then you just paint a picture of a sunday morning with hangovers and yeah uh and i think most of us if we've been lucky and this is a book about privileged people have had those wonderfully

carefree years at the time of course you don't see as wonderfully carefree it's only in retrospect yeah it is I mean actually looking back you know my my 20s were absolutely riven with anxiety of all kinds you know and then I I got to I did have these sort of golden days and golden moments you know but um it's not to say that there wasn't there weren't anxieties in there I got to my 30s and I thought, you know, finally, because I think I'm probably quite a serious character. I didn't have to go out and pretend to be having fun all the time. But what I wasn't prepared for, what I didn't anticipate,

was what happened when I started trying to become pregnant and how that just really changed my life for many, many, many years. It changed my relationships, affected my friendships, really kind of, many years. Changed my relationships. Affected my friendships. Really kind of affected so much. Because you became what? I mean, I was in this cycle. I had many miscarriages. I was just in a cycle of, you know, hope, despair, grief, control. You know, that's kind of made into the book in Hannah's character,

just having to control every aspect of my life and what I ate, you know. So I just became a kind of a different sort of person, I think. But I also, you know, there were gifts in that time as well, because it's the period in which I started writing. And I was able to draw on a lot of those kind of difficult experiences and, you know, turn them into fiction. And we shouldn't let the conversation end without me asking how you were able to get pregnant and stay pregnant. So I'd had, I think it was miscarriage number five. And I was actually in Manchester, which is not where I was living, but it's where I'm from. And a nurse there said,

this isn't normal, you must go and get this checked out further. And I felt like I'd already had every test in the book. But I went to a place called the Recurrent Miscarriage Clinic at St Mary's Paddington, and they sent my bloods off to the States and said, you've got this rare clotting disorder, and if you're lucky enough to get pregnant again, then take blood thinners. And six weeks later, I fell pregnant again and I took blood thinners. And at the age of 41, I

carried a pregnancy to term and my daughter's three and a half now. That's a great way to end that conversation with the novelist Anna Hope, whose book is absolutely brilliant, actually. It's called Expectation and it's out now. If you're looking for part-time work for flexible work we would love to hear from you today because tomorrow on the program we're talking about just how tough it can be to find the right part-time role something that really uses your skills and abilities we'll also be talking to employers about what they're doing to make part-time work better for everybody involved so if that's you you, contact the programme via Twitter or Instagram

or email through the website bbc.co.uk slash womanshour. Friday's programme is all about dance, dance or dance, and Shirley Ballas, who is the head judge on Strictly, is going to be here, and so too is Curtis Pritchard. That is Friday's edition of Woman's Hour. Now Vicky Phelan is a household name in Ireland. She is the woman who exposed a medical scandal there which affected her and indeed over 200 other Irish women. Vicky is 44, her children are 14 and 8 and she found out that cervical smear tests, including hers, were mistakenly given the all-clear when they were in fact abnormal.

Now, this meant that women didn't get the treatment that might have prevented or halted their cancer. Well, Vicky went to court and was eventually awarded 2.5 million euros in compensation. And Vicky is now living with a terminal prognosis, but she is getting treatment. She's written a book about her experience, it's called Overcoming a Memoir and she's in our studio in Dublin this morning. Vicky, good morning to you.

Good morning, Jane. First question is just really, how are you? I'm really well, thank you. I just had my 25th infusion of the immunotherapy drug that I'm on called Pembrolizumab on Wednesday and I have an absolutely fantastic quality of life. If you didn't know you wouldn't say I had cancer to be honest. You know at this stage with the terminal diagnosis I you know most people are in either a hospice or in hospital with pain management and you know I'm not living my life like that. I just go up and down for my

treatment every three weeks and I'm living really well. Well can we go back then to the smear test you had in 2011 and the result was negative. Yes so I went for my smear in 2011 about three and a half months after I had my son Dara and at the the time, actually, and they've changed it now, but at the time when you had a baby at your six week checkup with your gynaecologist, you'd have a smear. And that's exactly what happened in my case. Now, I was a little bit later going in for my checkup. So it was maybe eight weeks or nine weeks after having my son had my smear test with my gynaecologist and got the phone call, you know, a few days or a week later when the result came back to say that yeah no there's no

problem at all vicky everything is clear you know you'll just have another smear in three years time and you just uh you know come and present yourself as normal with the screening program so because i'd never had an abnormal smear jane i didn't worry about it at all i wasn't expecting to hear anything different so i just got on with my life and when did you notice symptoms? I didn't notice symptoms until about March 2014, so nearly three years later. And what I noticed was just a, you know, very light spotting really in between my periods. And I'm very lucky that I've always had very regular periods. I, you know, I used to literally get them on the same day practically every month. I was like clockwork. And what I noticed was the spotting that I was getting in between my period, it was a different colour. And that's what made me kind

of think, oh, this is a bit unusual. And that's important, isn't it? Yeah, very important. So it's like a light pink, I would say to women, you know, with menstrual blood, it's very dark. This was light pink, almost red at times. You know, I now know that it was a tumour that was shedding. And that's, you know, key to all of this, you know, for the different colour, you know, it's generally not menstrual blood. So I kept an eye on it for maybe three months. And then on the third month, what happened that really drove me into my GP was that I bled after sex with my husband. And it was quite a lot of blood and it was red.

So that really frightened me, to be honest. So I went straight in to my GP on the Monday after the weekend that we went away. And then you got the absolute and it must have been utterly devastating the diagnosis of cervical cancer. Yes it really was and I suppose you know in the book I write about this quite in a lot of detail because I think you know something that everybody dreads to hear is the cancer word, you know, and, you know, to be honest, Jane, I had had no symptoms other than, you know, a slight bit of spotting and the bleed after sex. I'd had no pain. I wasn't having any other symptoms. And I think, you know, if you've never had cancer, you always assume that if you're going

to get diagnosed, you're going to be in agony and you'll have very obvious symptoms. But that wasn't the case. So you started treatment, obviously, and you write very explicitly, actually, in the book. And I do think it's important that you do about the immense strain that this put on your marriage and indeed on the whole family. Yeah, I really wanted to get this across in the book because I think it will help other women, because I certainly felt in my case that, you know, the side effects of the treatment are really overlooked. Apart from the physical side effects, they give you all, you know, the drugs to deal with the anti-nausea tablets to deal with the sickness. And they give you steroids because you're, you know,

to try and give you a little bit of energy because you're tired. But they actually don't deal with the horrendous side effects as a woman that you feel after having this treatment. So the treatment, you know, that I had radiation, you know, you have external radiation, but then you have this form of radiation called brachytherapy, where they literally insert rods, you know, up your vagina and they radiate whatever is left inside you. And afterwards, you know, if I literally scraped my nail on the inside of my vagina, even to this day, Jane, it would bleed.

Like that's how much it affects you. So you can imagine trying to, you know, resume any type of sexual relationship after having treatment, you know, in this way is very hard. And in our case with myself and my husband, you know, we'd already been having problems because, you know, our daughter had had a very serious accident the year before I was diagnosed with cancer, which really had kind of knocked us for six. So, you know, it's an awful cancer to get. And I've met so many women, to be honest, whose relationships have just not survived because they just couldn't deal with the effect of the treatment.

But the diabolical truth is that this shouldn't or need not have happened because your smear in 2011 wasn't negative it was positive wasn't it? Yes exactly and that that was the the very you know very hard for me to to to take that actually and I mean I only discovered that this was the case when I insisted on a biopsy so when I was re-diagnosed at the end of 2017, I'd had a conversation with my gynaecologist, which I, you know, I speak about in the book. And basically, you know, he told me about this audit that had been carried out by Cervical Check, looking at women who had already been diagnosed with cervical cancer. And what they did was they went back and looked at their smear history to see was there anything that you know could have been picked up earlier but he never really said

it was quite vague that you know I definitely had cancer in 2011. It was when I insisted on the biopsy and was sitting in this treatment room that I decided you know it was time to look at my file and see what I could find about this audit and I this report, which was in black and white and quite clearly stated that, you know, in 2011, when they reviewed my smear, it wasn't clear I actually had cancer. It wasn't even pre-cancerous. I had cancer in 2011. And you were not the only woman? No, I wasn't. And at the time, you know, when I discovered this, I assumed I was the only woman. I thought this was something that just had happened to me. And obviously, because I was in a situation where I knew time was of the essence and I'd been given a terminal diagnosis, you know, I went off and,

you know, found a solicitor to take this case. And we found out literally through the discovery process that anything I was mentioned in obviously had to be given to my legal team. And we discovered at that stage that there were 14 other women. And, you know, the day I found out that there were other women, really, you could have knocked me for six. I couldn't believe that this was happening to other women. I never understand how people like you who have been through so much and such devastating poor health are able to fight a campaign of any kind.

Where do you get the strength from? I'm a very stubborn person, Jane, and I'm very principled. And I suppose I just felt that I could not stand over this and not make sure that these other women found out. And, you know, I often wonder

if I hadn't been as sick as what I had been at the time, you know, because I knew my time was really limited and I didn't start on the drug that I'm on until, you know, literally the week of my court case. So I was, you know, four months after getting this terminal diagnosis and I was on no treatment and I was getting very, very sick. So, you know, because I was backed into a corner and I had nothing to lose, you know, they often say, you know, don't get

somebody like that angry because I had nothing to lose. So I thought, you know, don't get somebody like that angry because I had nothing to lose. So I thought, you know, I was so adamant that I needed these women to know before I died that I did whatever I could to make sure that that would happen. Now, part of the explanation is that the smear tests, the testing of them, was outsourced to the United States to a laboratory there. That's right, isn't it? That's correct. So this all happened back in 2008. So it was a cost-saving measure, really. I remember watching back some of the footage in the Dáil chambers, in the Parliament chambers in Ireland here at the time. And, you know, it was very hard for me to watch that, to see that

there were people who were trying to keep this service in the country and the decision at the end of the day was made on a cost-saving measure you know that the quality was not on the top of the agenda at the time it was basically the cost of the service. Right and there is a broader question here and you do mention it in the book of frankly it's there's misogyny somebody at some point quoted to you the line, nuns don't get cervical cancer. Yeah, that was a bit of a, you know, that was definitely a shock to me to read about some of the experiences that women had had with their consultants.

That came about as a result of the independent review that Dr. Gabriel Scully, a public health doctor who has done some work in the UK as well, you know, he spoke to a lot of the women, interviewed them all quite a lot in a lot of detail. And one of the threads and the theme that came out in his report very strongly was this paternalistic culture that existed where some of these consultants, you know, said some awful things to women, such as nuns don't get cervical cancer to the family of a woman who had already died and who had been a smoker and basically

he said that read between the lines, she wouldn't have got cancer if she wasn't a smoker and she hadn't had sex basically. Vicky Phelan, thank you very much. I know you've agreed to talk longer in the Women's Hour podcast. We're very grateful. I look forward to chatting to you a bit more. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Jane. Thank you the Woman's Hour podcast. We're very grateful. I look forward to chatting to you a bit more. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much, Jane. Thank you. Take care of yourself. Vicky Phelan, very brave woman and the author of her new memoir, Overcoming. There will be more in the podcast a little later. And of course, Vicky is very keen to emphasise you should go for your smear tests. It's absolutely imperative that you do. Now, earlier in the summer, we asked you to send us an image, a picture that captured you at your very best. Not necessarily looking your best or not just looking your best but just feeling fabulous. Today you can hear from Suzanne Goldberg. She's from London and she brings us a

picture of laughter. You can see it now on the Woman's Hour website. The picture I brought in was taken a few weeks ago in my best friend's garden one very sunny afternoon. I'm not working at the minute because I've had a really nasty bout of depression and I'm working through it and for whatever reasons my last job that I was working at just triggered all of my triggers and made me really unwell. You get sucked into that I need to make more money, I need to earn more money, I need to get my head down, I need to be successful and my best friend Nikki turned around to me and said look take the summer off, come out on tour

with my theatre company, come and manage. It's a bit of an adventure. You'll be with some amazing actors, really lovely people. And we get to work together for the summer, which is something we've talked about. And so this was, we were painting ladders in her back garden, ready to go out on the set of Romeo and Juliet. And I think I'd done some stupid pose with the ladder which I'd said come on take a picture of me which was the worst picture you can ever imagine and then she just kind of snapped me laughing at my own stupidity and she's caught this moment of me laughing that real laugh that just comes from a place of such complete happiness and for someone who suffers from

depression those moments are so precious and the fact that she caught it on camera is is just something actually I've printed it and framed it and put it on my bookshelf to remind me that I can have those moments even on the darkest days I still get those moments and that's my best day. I see a person who is genuinely really happy and free and one of the one of the things of depression for me is that it's just like these heavy chains that just hold you down and stop you enjoying the small moments and actually if you can capture those small moments and retain them, it's a better medicine than any kind of antidepressant drugs

or the amount of therapy that I'm going through. Just sometimes go, look, that's a picture of you really happy with someone who really enjoys your company just because you're you. That for me is one of the hardest things. Accepting that people just like hanging around me because, you know, I'm constantly telling myself, why? Why would they? Why would they? Well, that's why they would, because that's the person that my best friend sees. And, you know, and she keeps telling me that's the person that everyone else sees.

And the more I look at that, the more I can be that person. And in time, hopefully I won't need to go to therapy. I won't need to beat myself up for not feeling great. I can just be that kind of happy. I call it my Lorelei Gilmore for anyone who knows the Gilmore Girls. When I'm at my happiest and freest I feel like Lorelei Gilmore and wouldn't it be great to be like her a bit more. And so cold All you have to do is call my name And I'll be there on the next train

Where you lead Carole King's song, Where You Lead, and that was our listener, Suzanne Goldberg. Vicky Phelan has been good enough to stay for us in the studio in Ireland. Vicky, there was a couple of questions I really wanted to ask you. And one actually was about just how difficult it is financially when illness of this nature hits a family. And also, of course, the crash really affected Ireland very badly, didn't it? It did. It really did. And that's one of the things I actually wrote quite extensively about in my book, because, you know, we were really suffering financially just before I was diagnosed with cancer because my husband is a carpenter.

And, you know, the building trade really got hit very hard here in Ireland. So he lost his job actually about six months after we had our second child and we'd had this big house in the country which we could no longer afford on one's salary so you know we tried to sell it and we couldn't so we had to rent it out and supplement it so we really suffered financially and then when I got hit with cancer I mean that just made things even worse because I was the main earner in our family so you know being out of work with cancer luckily enough I work for the public sector so I got my wages paid for a time. But it doesn't cover everything. You know, you still have to travel for treatment and you have all of these other expenses. Like, you know, what I would have liked to have had at the time, we couldn't simply couldn't afford it, was counselling, you know, like some psychosexual therapy. I remember speaking with a nurse after I finished my treatment

and being given this bag of dilators. Basically what these are, they're very hard plastic, like dildos but extremely hard, clinically quite plastic devices that you're supposed to insert in your vagina to try and keep it open basically for internal exams and also if you want to actually have a sex life and I remember kind of going oh my god you know is there any support for this you know if we're going to hit problems with this myself my husband and she said well you know I can refer you to a therapist but you know it'll cost you to 75 to 80 euros an hour and we simply didn't have that money you know

um so you know it really the financial side of it is really under um under you know people don't realize how bad it is until it hits home and when it happens to you now i was very lucky that where i live we have a really good local cancer support group who are absolutely fantastic and they provide services like driving people to and from appointments um they will actually make cooked dinners because that's one thing that particularly as as a woman, you know, I mean, my husband actually, you know, he's quite good at cooking. But, you know, once you're knocked out with cancer, I was coming home after treatment, I was literally going straight into bed and I'd stay there for two or three days, particularly after chemotherapy. So, you know, there were no dinners being made in our house until my husband got back from college

and, you know, the kids were hungry and you're giving them fish fingers or waffles, whatever is handiest, you know. But, you know, you really feel it when you don't have that, you know, routine of, you know, having your dinners. It affects everything, you know, in the family. So the support group provide a service like that. Also with kids going back to school, you know, I remember I got involved with the support group after I finished my treatment and we had one family where there were six kids and the mother was, you know, had been diagnosed with breast cancer and was very ill.

And the kids were going back to school and they simply couldn't afford with her being out of work to pay for uniforms and school shoes. And, you know, it really affects every part of your life. It's such an important part of it all. I wanted to mention as well that um sorry forgive me i completely lost my train of thought there i was actually actually for once in my life concentrating completely on what you were saying um and yeah my colleagues will testify that i don't always pay attention to what people are saying um oh yes now i've remembered now um the the fact that the um i mean i should have made it clear actually in the live interview that there was a similar problem

in the uk in kent back in the 1990s um so was a similar problem in the UK in Kent back in the 1990s so you might have thought that the Irish system would have learned from that but but apparently not and I should say I mean I'm not I can't be 100% certain the British system has learned from it but anyway you know what I mean. Well I think you have to be honest because I mean you know if you think about it I know the uptake in women having their smears in the UK, I know that's an issue at the moment. Like the Jade Goody effect has definitely gone away. You know, when Jade died in 2009, there was a huge uptake in women going for smears. And I believe now that that, you know, that effect has actually gone and the numbers have dropped.

But, you know, at the same time, you haven't had any spike or increase in the amount of women being diagnosed with cervical cancer. And I do think it's because of the judgment that came out after the scandal in the Kent and Canterbury hospitals, because one of the things that came out as a result of that court case was this test, basically, that when smear takers or screeners are looking at a smear test the judge ruled that smear takers need to be absolutely confident that what they are passing as normal that a smear that is being passed as normal is definitely normal that they need to have that absolute confidence so if there's any doubt in their mind they need to pass it over to somebody else a second screener

to have a look that is the judgment that was made in a very recent case here, Ruth Morrissey's case, who took a case after my case. And basically the judge ruled, based on what had happened in the Kent and Canterbury hospitals scandal, exactly with the same test, that there has to be this absolute confidence that screeners are passing tests, smear tests that are normal. The problem at the moment is that ruling was made in October, Jane. That is being challenged, actually, by the state. So this is actually going to go to the Supreme Court in November. So does that disturb you at most?

Yes, absolutely. It really upsets me, to be honest, because this is the system that has been operating in the UK for the last 20 years. And, you know, women are very well looked after over in the UK as far as their cervical smears are concerned. And, you know, this has not had the effect that, you know, some of the medical professionals here are kind of saying, well, this will ruin screening. And, you know, you can't be absolutely confident. But this is exactly what has been operating in the UK for the past 20 years. And I believe because I spoke to a lot of people about this, there was a huge outcry in the UK at the time that, you know, along the same lines. And, you know, what they predicted

did not come to pass. And women have been having their smears and you haven't had the spike in increase in women being diagnosed with cervical cancer as a result of it. So lessons were learned as far as we know. Yeah, well that is something positive. I mean you have, you've had personal conversations haven't you with the leading political figures of Ireland. It can't have been anything you would ever have expected to happen to you I imagine. No, absolutely not and actually we meet them quite regularly. We actually had a meeting very recently,

just on Monday, literally after the Taoiseach met Boris Johnson. He was meeting with a group of women from our patient support group, the 221 Plus group. And this is with the view to building up to a state apology. So we've been working on this

in the background for the last number of months with the mediator. And one of the things we've learned, on this in the background for the last number of months with the mediator. And one of the things we've learned both from the Scali report and from working with the mediator is that, you know, money is not always the answer, Jane. You know, a lot of people who have been harmed by medical negligence, you know, all they want is an apology, you know, and somebody to say that, you know, harm has been done and that they are sorry. And in my case, you know, I didn't get that admission of liability. I did get an apology from the head of the HSE, which would be the equivalent to the NHS.

But for me, it wasn't from somebody who I needed to hear it from. I needed to hear it from our government, you know, that they felt that this was something that was wrong and should never have happened. So that is what we're leading up to at the moment. So the Taoiseach met with a group of women on Monday. And literally what happened in this meeting was he listened to women's stories and families of women who have died. And I definitely think, you know, it's helped to move towards a softening on the part of the state.

Right. But I mean, what we have to make clear is that, first of all, women have died, as you've pointed out. And also, none of this would have come to light if you hadn't asked those questions. Yes, absolutely. I mean, they could have got away with it, couldn't they? Yes. Yeah, unfortunately, that is the case, you know. And look, I'm just very lucky that because of the fact that I work in research and I'm, you know, very attuned to things and reading documents and reading between the lines, you know, I was lucky that I was able to spot that there was just something wrong with this report.

I knew there was a page missing and that really bothered me. Yeah, right. Well, it's such a glaring illustration of how we all need to ask questions. And you did. And there's been positive results. And you are a real example. Thank you very much, Vicky. Not at all. Thank you. Take care of yourself. One of our listeners has just said, actually, what an inspiring, brave and humbling woman you are in a world awash with evil. So there you go. Thank you. I endorse that.

That's from a listener called Belinda and our very best wishes to Vicky Phelan. Now to your thoughts on the Lib Dem conference. Marion says, interesting that your guest this morning, that was the president of the Lib Dems, representing the Lib Dems, has such a skewed idea of what being a Democrat means. Firstly, she wants to overturn the results of the largest participatory democratic exercise in UK history. And secondly, she refuses to work with the leader of the official opposition in Parliament, who was twice democratically elected by the biggest membership of any political party in the UK. Sally says, I'm a staunch Remainer and I want Brexit stopped.

I struggle with leave voters because they can't say why they want to leave based on facts and reason. Zina, I'm happy to have Yellowhammer raised as a concern, but could we also have a two- or three-year worst-case scenario, worst-case economic scenario for remaining within the EU. Whilst there's uncertainty around Brexit, the public should also be presented with the possible outcomes of remaining. A listener says, stop letting them say a no deal will be a disaster. Challenge them to prove it will be. No one ever states how. From Matt,

If the Lib Dems win a general election with a 52% majority, would we be able to have another vote if we think they didn't give us all the facts about their plans? From Gwyn, Right, I hope that's as balanced as we can make it. We are talking to Brexit Party supporters on the programme tomorrow. Thanks for listening and taking part. And you can get the podcast, of course, whenever it suits you via BBC Sounds. But we'll see you live two minutes past ten tomorrow.

You're Dead to Me is a new history podcast for people who just don't like history. Or at least people who forgot to learn any at school. In each of our episodes, I'm joined by a top-notch comedian and an expert historian to rummage through the most fascinating things you should know about the global past. You'll learn about Boudicca, Captain Blackbeard, Harriet Tubman, the Spartans, the history of men's and women's football, and so much more. To fill in the blanks in your historical memory banks, subscribe to You're Dead to Me on BBC Sounds. And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this? What does she have to gain from this?

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