Carol Grogan is the Chief Inspector of Social Services  at HIQA Ireland’s independent regulator for health and social care where she spent a career defined by purpose, precision, and an unwavering commitment to the wellbeing of others. A nurse by training and a leader by vocation, she was also a passionate traveller, avid reader, keen gardener, and devoted family member whose life, as she wrote it, was vivid and moving forward. In October 2024, a routine mammogram changed everything. Her debut memoir, The Shadow That Walks Beside Me, was born from the journal she kept in the months that followed a small act of defiance she never planned, from a woman who had always imagined she might write a book, but never this one.