{"id":303433,"date":"2026-01-25T21:02:10","date_gmt":"2026-01-25T21:02:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/303433\/"},"modified":"2026-01-25T21:02:10","modified_gmt":"2026-01-25T21:02:10","slug":"i-dont-have-time-for-this-doctor-told-louth-woman-27-before-cancer-diagnosis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/303433\/","title":{"rendered":"‘I don’t have time for this’ – Doctor told Louth woman (27) before cancer diagnosis"},"content":{"rendered":"

January is cervical cancer awareness month<\/a> and over 250 women are diagnosed with cervical cancer in Ireland every year.<\/p>\n

According to the Mary Keating Foundation<\/a>, Ireland has one of the highest rates of cervical cancer in Western Europe and\u00a082 women die from the disease in Ireland annually.<\/p>\n

Cervical cancer mostly affects women aged 30 to 50 and it is very rare to be diagnosed under age 25, according to the foundation.<\/p>\n

Aine Lawrence (44) from Dundalk, Louth, was diagnosed with cervical cancer at 27-years-old in 2008 when she was experiencing some irregular bleeding.<\/p>\n

Aine ended up in\u00a0A&E and it was there she says a doctor was really dismissive towards her and her situation.<\/p>\n

He told her: “I don’t have time for this, this is so stupid, and anyway, you’re 27, women your age just don’t get cancer.<\/p>\n

\n Aine was shocked at this reaction from the doctor because cancer didn’t even cross her mind at that point.\n<\/p>\n

“I was like, what? Cancer?\u00a0Oh my gosh. So they took me back in for tests and within a week and a half\u00a0they told me I had cancer.<\/p>\n

“I’d had a smear test done earlier in the year and\u00a0I hadn’t got the results yet, but the results came in that week while I was waiting and it showed I had irregular cells. In the time it took for me to end up in A&E, it had progressed rapidly into cancer.<\/p>\n

“So I went to St James’s and I had a total radical hysterectomy and they’d hoped that\u00a0it would get all the cancer, but it didn’t.”<\/p>\n

At that point, the cancer had spread to Aine’s lymph nodes and she had\u00a0to stay in St Luke’s for seven weeks where she had chemotherapy and radiation therapy.<\/p>\n

“I finished in St Luke’s Christmas week and I was\u00a0able to come home and we did like follow-up scans and everything was fine. I was given the all-clear\u00a0in March and we all went to Disneyland,” she recalled.<\/p>\n

READ NEXT:<\/strong>\u00a0Man who admits killing but denies murdering mother in Dundalk accepts he caused multiple fractures to skull<\/a><\/p>\n

A year on from this, in 2009, Aine\u00a0went back to college and her life carried on as normal.<\/p>\n

She had an appointment with her radiologist and she asked for another scan to be done because it had been a year.<\/p>\n

Her radiologist told her it wasn’t really necessary but they did the scan anyway.<\/p>\n

“He was like, ‘well, not really, but I’ll give you one anyway…but you’re fine’.<\/p>\n

“I was actually up in St James’s\u00a0with my gynecologist about something else and I was like, ‘oh yeah, there’s a scan on the\u00a0system for me if you want to just check it’.<\/p>\n

“And they were like, ‘you’ve cancer in your lungs and your lymph nodes at stage four, which is terminal’,\u00a0which was crazy. They\u00a0basically said like get your affairs in order kind\u00a0of thing, it was a lot to take in.”<\/p>\n

This period in Aine’s life was beyond difficult, she was at a point where she was told she had about a year left to live.<\/p>\n

“I had palliative care nurses coming to see me all the time.\u00a0I got married, like it was a big rush cause, we thought I was going to die the next year. I\u00a0was really unwell. I lost my hair this time and\u00a0I looked really, really unwell, I felt awful, of course.”<\/p>\n

\n By nothing short of a miracle, however, Aine started treatment that October and when she went back\u00a0up for a scan more or less halfway through the treatment, the cancer was gone.\n<\/p>\n

\n “They were like, ‘this is amazing’…but the doctor\u00a0said, ‘it’s still going to come back and it’s still going to kill you.’ That’s a direct\u00a0quote\u00a0from my oncologist…so that was crazy.”\n<\/p>\n

\n Aine said that after this, she and her family still thought she was terminal despite the scan showing the cancer was gone.\n<\/p>\n

\n “I just tried to\u00a0just\u00a0love the kids and love my family as much as I could.\u00a0I was in remission, waiting all the time for it to come\u00a0back.\n<\/p>\n

\n “And I started having pain in my hips and it was my palliative care nurse\u00a0who\u00a0noticed it, so they sent me for MRIs and CT scans and things like that, and they found that I had\u00a0radiation damage in my pelvis.\n<\/p>\n

\n “So my left hip is really badly affected by it and\u00a0it continues to be badly affected. At that stage, we thought I was going to be in a wheelchair\u00a0because the bone was just degrading. They put me on oxycodone, oxycontin and fentanyl and Lyrica as pain relief\u00a0because I think they thought I was at end of life, so they were giving me end of life\u00a0drugs.”\n<\/p>\n

\n Aine ended up being on those end of life drugs for 13 more years.\n<\/p>\n

\n “I was just dealing with pain every day, chronic pain every day,\u00a0mobility problems…all from radiation damage.\u00a0It’s affected my bladder, my bowel, my kidneys, my bones, my nerves,\u00a0everything in that area.\n<\/p>\n

\n “I still deal with that every day. It’s not a typical\u00a0thing to have this kind of reaction to radiation, but I won the side affects lottery with radiation,\u00a0which is great.”\n<\/p>\n

\n Aine’s marriage ended during this time; she said that it\u00a0didn’t survive the trauma of\u00a0cancer.\u00a0\n <\/p>\n

\n In 2020, Aine suffered a 40-minute long\u00a0neurological event, similar to a seizure which is thought to be because of the pain relief medication she was on for such a long period of time.\n <\/p>\n

\n But today, she is engaged and she and her husband-to-be are working in and own a tattoo shop in Dundalk. She is cancer-free the last 16 years, beating the odds and expectations from her doctors.\n <\/p>\n

\n Aine advises every woman to get a cervical screening regularly and said it is nothing to be embarrassed of.\n <\/p>\n

\n “I’m not at all embarrassed. I’ve been on national television talking about cervical cancer changes to my body. It\u00a0doesn’t bother me to talk about it because somebody has to talk about\u00a0it.\u00a0I know people can find smear tests uncomfortable, but I mean, you would prefer that\u00a0than chronic pain every day, or having chronic bowel issues, or having to get a\u00a0stoma bag, which is a possibility for me in a few years because of radiation damage.\n <\/p>\n

\n “And it’s like…there’s so many worse things in the world than a few moments of discomfort,\u00a0people get\u00a0bikini waxes and they won’t get a smear test and a bikini wax is way more\u00a0painful than a smear test. Way more painful.”\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"January is cervical cancer awareness month and over 250 women are diagnosed with cervical cancer in Ireland every…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":303434,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[78],"tags":[23663,18,135,690,19,17,23664],"class_list":{"0":"post-303433","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-health","8":"tag-dundalk","9":"tag-eire","10":"tag-health","11":"tag-hospital","12":"tag-ie","13":"tag-ireland","14":"tag-louth"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115957763121973375","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303433","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=303433"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303433\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/303434"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=303433"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=303433"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=303433"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}