Vicky Phelan has had ‘significant shrinkage’ in tumours because of new treatment

Vicky Phelan has had "significant shrinkage" in her tumours because of a new treatment.

The mum-of-two was diagnosed with terminal cancer after receiving a false negative test result through CervicalCheck. Phelan discovered that she had cancer in 2014 but was only informed that her test had been misread last year. Speaking on RTE's The Ray D'Arcy Show yesterday, Phelan said that a CT scan had shown a "significant shrinkage" in her tumours and that she wasn't in pain anymore. She said:

”He was bursting to tell me, to be honest. He said, ‘This is just absolutely fantastic news and you’re just absolutely not going to believe it. There’s significant shrinkage in your tumours’.

“My stomach has gone down, I’m not in pain anymore.”

Phelan was given three doses of cancer immunotherapy drug, Pembrolizumab, which is normally not licensed for cervical cancer. She said her doctor in Dublin's St Vincent's Hospital has been campaigning for the treatment to become available to more women in Ireland with similar diagnoses. "I wasn’t going to take no for an answer", she said.

"When you are given a terminal diagnosis and you have no hope, you’ll do whatever you have to get the drug if you think it’s going to work."

The Limerick woman said that she wasn't "naive enough" to think that the treatment could cure her cancer, but that she found the news "amazing." Phelan is one of the 206 women so far who were given incorrect screening results from CervicalCheck.