A woman came to the ER with a brain bleed–inflicted by the husband who beat her—resulting in partial blindness that couldn’t be fixed. She tried to return to being a schoolteacher but never made it.
Then there was the guy who came into the ER, shot in the head, his vision permanently destroyed. And the diabetic woman, mother of a young child, who was pushed to the floor so hard that she broke a bone and couldn’t walk or talk or get to the phone. Unable to get her insulin, she went downhill until she was near death and blind.
If this sounds like an episode of The Pitt, you’d be right. Except I am not the handsome Dr. Robby in Pittsburgh. I am a retinal surgeon who spent forty years at Wills Eye Hospital in Philadelphia, often treating victims of violence and trauma to the eyes. These stories, and many more, became the basis for my first novel, Invisible Justice. I am a debut author at age seventy-six.
I wanted to be a fiction writer from the time I was very young. When I was a resident I wrote before my shifts. And then when my career and other responsibilities made it impossible, I took notes. I wrote down cases and insights for decades, knowing that someday, I’d transform them into novels.
What The Pitt gets so right is the level of trauma doctors experience. Don’t get me wrong. Like Dr. Robby, I also saw the best of humanity—especially the heroic efforts of my colleagues at their patients’ greatest hour of need. It was my privilege to have saved or improved the vision of thousands of people.
But the darkest part of the job—witnessing the cruelty human beings inflict on one another—took a heavy toll on me. Over time, I began to think of it as a kind of moral blindness: not a failure of sight, but a failure to see other people as human beings. At one point, a pathologist colleague told me that fewer than fifty percent of murders are solved. How could this be?
I was especially troubled by psychopathic people who got away with torturing and killing innocent people. During grand rounds, I listened to psychiatrists who explained how a tiny percentage of people cannot be reformed but can inflict catastrophic harm. They may act like they are remorseful but then go out the next day and commit another heinous crime. If you harm someone, you should be punished. And if you get away without consequence, that’s when moral blindness extends beyond the individual to the system itself.
When I finally retired, I turned my full attention to writing medical thrillers. From my notes and memories, I dreamed up Kyle McCann, a strong female lead and gifted physician, who becomes distraught after watching violent criminals repeatedly escape consequences. She and her love interest, Dr. Graham Kurland, a surgeon and decorated war hero, are drawn into a secret cabal of vigilantes who deliver justice.
These two characters performed the fictional wishful fulfillment that I could never carry out in real life. My medical heroes could hunt down evil villains who victimized patients. And they would make these reprehensible bullies and cowards suffer in the same ways that innocent people like my patients had—but invisibly, so no one would ever know.
While I loved using my medical training and expertise to save lives and heal patients’ sight, and while medicine must and should always be neutral, it gave me a strange satisfaction to use my doctorly knowledge to deliver invisible justice. Of course, Kyle and Graham are on a collision course with cruelty, psychopaths, and big moral decisions about whether to break their oath: “First do no harm.” Ultimately, I wanted to create moral complexity–characters trying their best to make a chaotic world a better place.
Mind you, it took me years and years of writing and rewriting—and lots of help from amazing teachers and my incredible family—to learn the writing craft and gain the tools that would allow me to bring these characters to life. Sometimes I think it takes as much training, practice, and knowledge to write a novel as it does to perform a surgery.
Yes, I’m a debut novelist at the age of seventy-six. And I couldn’t be happier as I make my dreams of publishing –and justice–come true.
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