Time of Death or The Life Of A Resident: A Memoir

It's been a while since I have written something in here, so with a new book in the works, now seems like as good a time as any.

That's right. The new book manuscript is getting worked at the publisher, and now we have a cover.

Time of Death is work that is a long time coming, but due for release FALL 2020. It's a bit of a departure from the young/new adult paranormal fantasy realm. Instead, this is a stand-alone novel that plunges into a dark mystery, and much of it was inspired by my life as a medical resident in Chicago. Not an autobiography, by any means. But some of these things happened. The rest is a writer's delight.

This tale started back in 2006, during the first half of my senior year as an OBGYN resident. Everyone has at least seen or knows what Grey's Anatomy is about, and let me tell you, it is nothing like real life in a hospital as a physician-in-training. Consequently, I despise shows like that because none of them touch on the reality that is far more interesting and deep (except Scrubs, but that's a discussion for another day). During the final year of training, I was named Chief Resident and had the duty of supervising the other residents, coordinating schedules between clinics, and shuffling a lot of other duties within the residency to help ensure that the residents were trained properly. The four years I spent in Chicago were exhausting but rich with experiences.

Between all the residents, we did rotations each month that placed us in different training modalities (eg, a month spent in the emergency room, a month or two spent with general surgery). One of those months is all nights, from 7pm to 7am six days a week, and we all covered nights individually multiple times during the residency. At night, we cared for all the obstetrics patients that came into labor and delivery or anything gynecology related that might come through the emergency room. And in Chicago, it could get very busy, but it was also unpredictable.

One of those particular nights, it was thankfully a little slow. Labor and delivery was relatively quiet, with just the women staying that had delivered earlier in the day. A handful of nurses were available to take care of those women. I studied in the resident lounge at one end of the labor and delivery unit, all by myself in a room with a little TV running in the background just for noise.

And then I got a weird phone call from the nurse's station. One nurse, we'll call her Jane, called to tell me that the patient in room 2, a postpartum woman who had delivered a baby that morning, had called her husband at home at 3 a.m. and she was terrified. So he called the labor and delivery desk to ask if someone could check on her. The nurse went to the patient's room and the patient relayed a story that she was watching television because she couldn't sleep. She had just finished breastfeeding and put the baby away in the bassinet. When she rested back in bed to watch TV, she said the bathroom door opened and a man came out, stepped up to her bedside and began to yell at her in a language she didn't understand. She panicked and tried to ring the bedside buzzer, which alerts the nurse's station, but it didn't work. She turned away to get her phone to call her husband, and when she turned back the man had disappeared.

The nurses didn't know what to do, but they knew I was on and that I didn't back down from weird stuff like this. So they called me to come check out the room -- by myself while the rest of them huddled outside the room and waited until I came out. The patient had already been moved to a different room. She was fine, just a little shaken (and she went home the next day without any problems, by the way). Of course, I got right over there and inspected the room. There wasn't anything exciting to say about it at this point. Just the fact that this happened.

That was the point where the nurses and I started talking and they told me dozens of stories from around the hospital, stories of things they had experienced or stories that they had heard over the years. They talked about closed units that they tried to avoid, call rooms they didn't like going into because the cabinet doors would open on their own, or hallways where they heard whispers or felt "creeped out".  So many of these stories were related by other nurses that I spoke to at other times. Things they all had independently experienced.

And that was the moment I came up with Time of Death, a paranormal fiction with just a touch of autobiography hidden between the lines. I had originally started in in 2006 but shelved it when it was only about 1/3 of the way done because I graduated from residency and then life became extremely busy in medical practice. I had gotten far enough away from it that I wasn't sure it would ever be completed, even though I knew exactly what would happen and how it would end. Other books came out of me instead, and a publisher picked them up.

Then, I turned back to the manuscript, read what I had written so long ago and wanted to get back into it. The final edits were eventually completed in winter 2020, just at the start of COVID-19. So many terrible and tragic things happened in my life in the beginning of this year, but completing Time of Death came as a good distraction to help in the healing process. This might sound a little odd, given the subject matter of the book, but it's really the act of writing that is therapeutic.

There is much more to come, so stay tuned for more tales and the breadcrumbs of information about the story line, release dates, and more.