How I Followed My Doctor’s Orders to Write a Medical Thriller

Early one Tuesday morning five years ago, I stood gloved, gowned, masked, and mystified by the people and place surrounding me. Instead of sitting hunched over my screen at our agency to crank out ad copy, I stood amid a scrub-clad crew of medical pros waiting for the guy who talked me into taking a detour from the usual start to my day.

Dr. Lee Thibodeau was an important client to our firm, and I enjoyed distilling the technical info he shared with me into promotional pitches for his company. He had the kind of upbeat attitude and tireless energy that are the keys to success for any entrepreneur. But Lee’s MedTech products were merely a side hustle to his full-time gig as one of Maine’s most preeminent neurosurgeons. So when he collared me in our conference room one morning to pitch me the idea of turning my talents to write the medical thriller he’d outlined, I said I’d be happy to review his notes for the story. What I didn’t tell him was that I’d also be looking for ways to turn him down gently while I did. The one novel I had published did have a fair amount of action in it. Still, that character-driven work of literary fiction was a far cry from the genre Lee was interested in.

To my surprise, after noodling with the idea for several days I started seeing ways to honor Lee’s premise for the story while making it my own. And even if I was skeptical about my ability to dive into his world and surface with enough knowledge of the technology, techniques, and mood of modern medicine to distill it into a plausible medical thriller, I thought the exercise might at least help me pump up the plots in my future work.

But as the circulating nurse in the OR pinched the bridge of my face mask to block the breaths that kept fogging my glasses while I watched the other medical pros who clearly belonged in this place take their stations, I started feeling like a different kind of “staff” infection in that room.

It was only me, of course, not the medical team, who felt that way. When I asked the young surgical tech laying out the shiny row of tools at the foot of the table exactly what kind of procedure Lee would perform that day, he answered brightly. “It’s a spinal fusion,” he said, while my stomach gave a flip. “It’s a four-hour procedure to connect the vertebrae in the lumbar so they grow into a single bone.”

Lee swept in soon after with a warm greeting that made me feel better, especially after he introduced me to every member of his team. And the hours that followed were so utterly fascinating that the sights and sounds accompanying the slicing of tissue, drilling of bone, and constant suctioning of blood never even bothered me.

But the mood in that room was the most illuminating aspect of my medical field trip that day. It flexed between moments of intense focus when every team member remained completely quiet and interludes of casual conversations and even jokes among Lee’s crew.

Only one team member didn’t join in the latter. The reason why was another essential part of my education that day. When Lee introduced me to the anesthesiologist before the procedure started, she was the one person in that room who didn’t meet my eyes. I soon understood why. The potent mix of drugs she had to administer while continually reviewing every aspect of the patient’s vital signs on her monitor never let her take her eyes off the screen of her anesthesia machine.

The hours I spent watching Lee and his team work on his patient gave me a view into the character and culture of a surgical team that no amount of online research could have ever granted. What began as a disorienting day in an alien world turned into the foundation for a medical thriller that had the plausibility critical to grounding a work of fiction. I’ll share future posts about how that work took shape to become The Corpse Bloom over the next few weeks. Those stories of that story will be the prologue to the book I’ll be publishing in early December. Thanks for staying tuned!