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ARTICLES AND ANNOUNCEMENTS
A Doctor Who Incubates Medical Mysteries
With the publication of his first novel, Laguna Beach resident and emergency room doctor Christopher Stookey might join the ranks of Michael Crichton, Robin Cook and Michael Palmer, all doctors with a literary bent who repurposed their medical expertise into a foundation for bestselling fiction. The 54-year-old’s medical mystery “Terminal Care,” published in June by Silver Leaf Books, touches on topical subjects, such as the race to find a cure for Alzehimer’s Disease and drug-industry ethics, which could spark public interest in his fiction. Both topics might have been parsed from this week’s headlines on the New York Times’ “Prescriptions” blog, which noted that “no one has solved the Alzheimer’s mystery yet. And there is a multibillion-dollar payoff for any company that does.” Just such a payoff motivates the evildoers in Stookey’s 340-page thriller. The budding novelist weaves a plot around a coverup of fatal side effects in drug treatment testing for Alzheimer’s disease. The novel’s two protagonists, aptly an ER doctor and an internist, alarmed by an increase in deaths in their hospital’s Alzheimer’s ward, embark on a dangerous mission to reveal the cover up before the drug is brought to market. Though he has been an ER doctor for 20 years, Stookey said his interest in writing came first, when he was a teenager. “It just took me 30 years to get around to it,” he said. In the meantime, he went to medical school and then specialized in emergency medicine. It was about 10 years ago that Stookey began “getting serious” about writing, publishing short stories and essays. His most recent essay, “First in My Class,” appears in “Becoming a Doctor” (W. W. Norton & Co, March 2010), a collection edited by Lee Gutkind that presents the testimonials of 19 doctors offering diverse insights to their profession. Stookey’s contribution centers on his wrenching involvement in a malpractice lawsuit when he was a new resident, fresh out of medical school. Stookey, an English major in college, had no aspirations as a mystery writer and assumed he would eventually write a “serious” novel. Instead, he followed the old prescriptive “write what you know.” His writing drew on his own discomfort, witnessed over the course of his medical career, with the inherent conflict of interest in university research underwritten by drug companies to determine a drug’s effectiveness. In writing a work of fiction that served as a critique of that relationship, Stookey said he fell naturally into the mystery genre. As it turns out, he likes it and has already begun another medical mystery. “I think I’ll make this genre my niche for the time being. It’s much more fun than writing that ‘serious’ novel,” he admitted. For him, writing about one’s occupation is not the same as viewing it recreationally on television. “Three 12-hour shifts a week of living in the real ER world is enough for me,” said Stookey, who chose emergency medicine for its “shift work,” without ties to after-hours pagers, that permits time for personal interests. Stookey has a colleague who is a professional jazz musician, for example, and another whose hobby is Iron Man competitions. “Medicine, especially emergency medicine, is full of real-life drama and highly tense, human situations,” he explained. “We see people at their best and people at their worst. We see the tragedy of death and the comedy of human frailty. What better job to fuel the imagination of an author?” “Terminal Care” is available at www.SilverLeafBooks.com. A Kindle edition is available on www.Amazon.com, which will soon also offer a print edition.
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