![\"Dr](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/CG4BY7WGPFBNXFO6K5RVT24SGU.JPG\")
Dr Suzanne Crowe, president of the Irish Medical Council and author. Photograph: Chris Maddaloni <\/p>\nIn the autumn of 2011, Dr Suzanne Crowe was sitting in an uncomfortable, plastic chair in the neonatal unit of a French hospital.<\/p>\n
Beatrice, her tiny newborn daughter, was lying in an incubator beside her. She had wisps of red hair above her small ears. Crowe remembers looking at her fingers and toes.<\/p>\n
It had been a difficult labour, with Beatrice arriving prematurely at 23 weeks during a family holiday to France. Despite this, they were optimistic, discussing what they would do when they could finally bring their youngest baby home.<\/p>\n
Crowe says she didn\u2019t have \u201can inkling\u201d that things weren\u2019t turning out like she hoped. Until one day, when a doctor came into the room and there was a \u201cchange in the atmosphere\u201d.<\/p>\n
The conversation, Crowe says, is one of her \u201cclearest memories\u201d. The doctor looked uncomfortable, she recalls, and asked her a number of times if her husband was nearby. He was in Dublin caring for the couple\u2019s three other children at the time.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe was kind of horrified and I could see that on her face. She didn\u2019t actually say a lot, but I do remember very clearly she used the expression, which was \u2018we see only a dark future for Beatrice\u2019.\u201d <\/p>\n
The phrase, though she had never heard it before, really \u201clanded\u201d with her, she says. \u201cIn very simple terms, she painted an entire landscape of what life might be like for us and for Beatrice, and where she thought that things were going to go.\u201d<\/p>\n
She called her now late husband Barry. She cannot remember what she said to him over the phone; she probably just cried, she says. He flew over to join her as soon as he could, so they could say goodbye to their 19-day-old child.<\/p>\n
In her memoir, Intensive Care: True Stories of Healing, Heartache and Hope from Inside Irish Children\u2019s Medicine, Crowe describes that moment vividly, as if it has been etched into her memory. <\/p>\n
Most people who work in healthcare would acknowledge that you probably do need to be a patient at some point. In order to see what life is like as a patient<\/p>\n
\u201cBarry and I held Beatrice together until her heartbeat slowed and faded away. It was short, and yet it was long. It could never be long enough, and I wish she were here now, but it happened as it did. Nothing can change that,\u201d she wrote.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs her mother I had felt her growing inside me, I heard one tiny cry when she was delivered, and I held her close on her last day.\u201d<\/p>\n
Throughout her book, the paediatric doctor speaks eloquently about the many patients who have had a profound impact on her. This year will mark 30 years since she qualified, during which time she estimates she has cared for about 80,000 people and their families.<\/p>\n
Many of those patients and experiences \u201creally changed my perspective\u201d, she says, but none more so than the loss of her own child.<\/p>\n
The memoir is an honest account of grief, but it also explores the complicated feelings many women can have when experiencing an unplanned or perhaps initially unwanted pregnancy.<\/p>\n
When she first learned she was pregnant with Beatrice, it came as \u201can absolute shock\u201d to herself and her husband. She was getting older, had had \u201cdifficult experiences\u201d with her previous pregnancies and she \u201cdid not want to be pregnant\u201d.<\/p>\n
Dr Suzanne Crowe, president of the Irish Medical Council and author. Photograph: Chris Maddaloni <\/p>\n
Throughout the course of her pregnancy, Crowe\u2019s hesitation dissipated, replaced by excitement and love for her unborn child. When Beatrice died, however, Crowe battled with intense guilt over her initial reaction to the news. <\/p>\n
In the throes of her grief, she remembers constantly picturing Beatrice\u2019s little body in the French hospital\u2019s mortuary, followed quickly by thoughts of blame that she hadn\u2019t wanted her in the beginning.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe fact that that whole mix of emotions had gone on in addition to her passing away meant that my head was just a complete mess. That led to a very difficult grief reaction. Now I have a lot more understanding around it. But it\u2019s only taken me 13 years to process the whole thing,\u201d she says with a smile.<\/p>\n
At the time of her daughter\u2019s death, Crowe says she was quite \u201cold fashioned\u201d when she thought about grief, and that you had to \u201cjust get over it\u201d.<\/p>\n
Her memoir is the first time she has spoken publicly about this loss. Until now, Crowe says she wore Beatrice like a secret; an \u201camulet that you hold close to your heart\u201d, but now she is ready to share her story.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe don\u2019t talk about child loss a huge amount, and it\u2019s hidden in a lot of families. I kind of thought, well, if I did speak about it, it might help other people to see that, in fact, you don\u2019t have to get over it in many ways,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
There remains a bridge between my experience with Beatrice and my love of caring for sick children<\/p>\n
\u201cYou can continue the bond and you can create a really powerful meaning for you. You don\u2019t have to express that to other people, but you take the pain of whatever happened, the loss, and you create a meaning that\u2019s very individual for you, and perhaps actually helps you to kind of do good things.\u201d<\/p>\n
After her passing, Crowe knew she wanted to give her daughter\u2019s life and death meaning. It was, she says, one morning near the end of her maternity leave when she was sitting on a rowing machine in the gym when she suddenly knew exactly what to do: return to paediatric intensive care.<\/p>\n
Before this, Crowe had worked for many years in anaesthesiology, having worked full-time in children\u2019s healthcare a decade earlier. Using Beatrice\u2019s death to make a difference among other families was like a \u201clifeline\u201d in those dark days, she says.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere remains a bridge between my experience with Beatrice and my love of caring for sick children and children at the end of their lives. They are inextricable and one could not exist without the other,\u201d she wrote in her book.<\/p>\n
She was somewhat apprehensive in the beginning that working with sick children might trigger her own grief. Premature babies, in particular, were something she was anxious about. But actually, she found, it was therapeutic in many ways.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne situation I can remember was looking after a child who just happened to have the exact same date of birth as Beatrice. So there was this little girl right in front of me. She even had red hair and Beatrice had a little bit of red hair,\u201d she remembers.<\/p>\n
\u201cNow, she needed my help, and I obviously had to get on and do the job, but inside I was absolutely floored by that.\u2029That really, really took the wind out my sails.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"Dr](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/GPLOEXOYHJEILGTO4I3O5XO3XA.JPG\")
Dr Suzanne Crowe, president of the Irish Medical Council and author. Photograph: Chris Maddaloni <\/p>\n
Each chapter of Crowe\u2019s book opens with a quotation. One such quote is from American physician Dr Francis W Peabody, which states: \u201cThe secret of the care of the patient is in caring for the patient\u201c.<\/p>\n
This, Crowe says, is something she has taken with her throughout her career, particularly since she was on the receiving end of the doctor-patient relationship.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think most people who work in healthcare would acknowledge that you probably do need to be a patient at some point. In order to see what life is like as a patient,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
Now, she says, she advocates for much more patient-centred care. Kindness in healthcare is incredibly important, she argues. And when looking after children nearing the end of their life, if she cannot help them live, then she believes it is important to give them \u201ca good death\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe mortality rate in children\u2019s intensive care is actually very low. But a good death is really important and helps you come away from that experience with a greater sense of peace. So the death itself isn\u2019t distressing,\u201d she adds.<\/p>\n