From Arklow in Co Wicklow, May Byrne was diagnosed with terminal cancer last year in St Michael’s Hospital in Dún Laoghaire. According to her daughter Marie Kindlon, May was given a year to live and made a decision that she wanted to die at home.
“We were advised that her GP and healthcare nurses would all be on hand for her. We brought her home on a Tuesday and that night the pain started.”
Over the following three days, her mother’s condition deteriorated. “We brought her to Care DOC and to her GP, but really all they could do was give her pain relievers and sedation. By Friday she hadn’t eaten or drank anything for two days and she was like a corpse. My father was 82 years of age and for him to see her like that was just awful. On the Friday I rang the consultant and his first words to me were ‘I knew it wouldn’t work, because you have no palliative care in Wicklow.’ She went back to St Michael’s in an ambulance.”
May Byrne died four weeks later in Blackrock Hospice.
“Her choice obviously would have been to die at home surrounded by her family, but she was well looked after in the hospice. The consultant was there monitoring her all the time so her symptoms were under control. She had the spiritual and emotional support that she needed.”
The family faced a 130km round trip from Arklow to visit May in her last days. “It’s dangerous at a time when you are under strain anyway to be facing in to a trip like that, and the fear is that something happens when you are not there. But she couldn’t die in her own county and I think everyone deserves that option.”