Holding On?

Set in a busy regional Neonatal Unit it traces the agony of staff and parents trying to decide whether baby Peter Flanagham should live.

Each of the individuals brings something of their own life experience to the encounter - experiences with severely abnormal children, with infertility, with incapacitating illness.

Personalities, religious conviction and childhood trauma all influence the way each of them feels and responds to the issue.

Can so divergent a group of individuals reach a consensus?

Resolving the dilemma is urgent. The consultant neonatologist faced with an agonising decision is all too well aware of the danger that someone in his team might blow the whistle on his practice, and makes determined efforts to understand the views and intentions of his medical and nursing colleagues.

While they explore their own opinions the days tick by inexorably for baby Peter's parents caught in a web of tragedy as much past as present. In spite of the staff's best endeavours to arrive at a consensus decision the family have their own solutions and the twist in the tale at the end of this book underlines the complexity of human experience and the enormous ramifications attending decisions related to prolonging life or allowing a baby to die.

This book is for anyone with an interest in human experience.

Exploring as it does the impact of the catastrophic event of having an extremely ill premature infant in a family, it has the potential to touch the hearts of men and women who have ever been part of a family.

It will strike a sympathetic chord for all those whose lives have been touched by the tragedy of a less than perfect baby.

It also explores the deep ethical dilemmas which surround the care of premature infants and those with severe abnormality.