Mater Hospital

The Mater Hospital is the central medical institution in the memoir’s account of Susan McGahern’s cancer, the place where the diagnosis and treatment became concrete while the children at home struggled to understand her repeated absences. Its presence is conveyed chiefly through remembered journeys and surviving correspondence. The hospital therefore stands at the meeting point of medical knowledge, family secrecy, and decisions about how Susan might continue to work and care for her family.

Diagnosis and Treatment

During the family’s first long stay at the barracks, Susan was admitted to the Mater Hospital for several weeks of tests and treatment after being diagnosed with breast cancer. Her young son remembers the upheaval more clearly than the clinical process: he was seven, did not know where his mother was, and was told not to ask but to pray. Susan herself objected to being kept in the dark. In a letter from the hospital, she told Francis (Frank) McGahern that the boy was beginning to understand and would not be put off as easily as the others; she also expressed hope that she would soon return home.

The memoir records a brief interruption in her treatment when Susan came back to the barracks for the birth of Dympna. The narrator retains little of that stay beyond a vague happiness, but recalls one sharp episode: his father took him in Packie McCabe’s car to a nursing home in Boyle to bring Susan and the baby home. With private cars taken off the roads during the war, the family’s own small Ford stood on blocks in a barrack shed. The return journey remained vivid in his memory: Susan carried Dympna in a white shawl, and laughter about the baby’s and Packie’s red hair went over the child’s head. Susan stayed with the family for about a week before leaving again, while Dympna was left with Bridgie McGovern.

Medical Correspondence and Prognosis

The hospital’s clinical importance is clearest in correspondence between Francis and Susan’s doctor, John Corcoran. Francis wrote to ask whether his wife should give up teaching and what her chances of recovery were. The question made her health a matter not only of treatment but of work, income, and the family’s next arrangements. The doctor advised against her leaving teaching while she remained in good health, unless medical advice changed; he also said she might be happier working than otherwise.

John Corcoran’s account of the disease was grave. He described a highly malignant growth, said that without treatment Susan would not have survived beyond a year from the time he first saw her, and reported that she had received radical operative treatment followed by deep X-ray treatment. Even after this, he estimated her chance of complete recovery at 30 percent and cautioned Francis against taking on financial liabilities on the assumption that she would recover. The memoir sets that clinical precision beside the family’s efforts to manage an uncertain future: the prognosis gave them information, but no certainty, and it did not settle how Susan should live in the time available to her.

Work, Home, and Continuing Treatment

While Susan was still in hospital, her siblings Maggie and Pat worked to find her a school nearer to the town, where they could help her. She was offered a permanent position at Aughawillan, a two-teacher school, and a house and farm at Corramahon were available within walking distance. These arrangements were linked to her illness: Beaghmore and the bog of Cloone were too far away, and the seriousness of her condition had made the family more willing to seek help and act on her behalf.

Susan chose Aughawillan over the possibility of returning to Lisacarn. Once allowed out of hospital, she planned to teach there for a day to secure the post, arrange a substitute, and return to the Mater Hospital for the remainder of her treatment. The sequence shows how treatment and employment were made to coexist where possible. Her correspondence about the school was usually conciliatory toward Francis, but on the question of the post she was firm: Aughawillan was what concerned her. The hospital thus forms part of a wider set of decisions through which Susan tried to preserve a working life and establish a home despite serious illness.

Recurrence, Secrecy, and Narrative Meaning

Later, after returning to school, Susan wrote that she was improved but still suffering and hoped that better weather might help. She suspected that the cancer had returned. Her stomach pain and recurring constipation and diarrhoea were presented to her as an unrelated illness from which she could recover if she made an effort. She asked Francis to write again to John Corcoran in Dublin, but he was reluctant, having already corresponded with the doctor secretly. The memoir does not describe a further admission to the Mater Hospital at this point; instead, the hospital’s earlier authority reverberates through the family’s argument over what Susan knows and what she is told.

The account places the doctor’s probability of recovery alongside Susan’s later suffering and the household’s reluctance to face what that suffering might mean. Her faith remained a source of strength, but the narrator observes that it could also be turned against her when Francis accused her of losing faith. In this way, the hospital’s significance extends beyond its medical role: it is where diagnosis and treatment entered the family record, while letters and subsequent recollection reveal how little a prognosis could resolve about fear, care, or the approaching loss. The memoir makes the institution present through those consequences rather than through a portrait of hospital life itself.