Pump Up Your Book Chats with Christopher Stookey

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Christopher Stookey, MD, is a practicing emergency physician, and he is passionate about medicine and health care. However, his other great interests are literature and writing, and he has steadily published a number of short stories and essays over the past ten years. His most recent essay, “First in My Class,” appears in the book BECOMING A DOCTOR (published by W. W. Norton & Co, March 2010); the essay describes Dr. Stookey’s wrenching involvement in a malpractice lawsuit when he was a new resident, fresh out of medical school. TERMINAL CARE, a medical mystery thriller, is his first novel. The book, set in San Francisco, explores the unsavory world of big-business pharmaceuticals as well as the sad and tragic world of the Alzheimer’s ward at a medical research hospital. Stookey’s other interests include jogging in the greenbelts near his home and surfing (he promises his next novel will feature a surfer as a main character). He lives in Laguna Beach, California with his wife and three dogs.

To find out more about Chris, visit his Amazon’s author page at http://www.amazon.com/Christopher-Stookey/e/B003UVLDI4/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0.

Thank you for this interview, Chris. Do you remember writing stories as a child or did the writing bug come later? Do you remember your first published piece?

Yes, I did write stories as an older child. I was in my early teens. I wrote short stories for my friends, stories in which my friends were the main characters. I would slightly disguise the names, using nicknames or names that rhymed with the real names. I would put my friends in amusing and sometimes awkward situations. Then I would share the stories with my friends, and we would laugh. It was fun, and my friends told me the stories were good. That’s what put the bug of being a writer in my head.

My first publication came much later. It was an essay called “Thoughts Upon the Five-Minute Office Visit.” It appeared in a magazine called Troika Magazine. It was about my experience as a doctor working in a busy urgent care clinic where we had just five minutes to see each patient. As you might imagine, the piece was rather critical of the five-minute system.

What do you consider as the most frustrating side of becoming a published author and what has been the most rewarding?

Without a doubt, the most frustrating side for me is book promotion. Terminal Care is my first novel, and I never anticipated the amount of promotion effort that would be needed. I thought, once the book was published, my work was done. The publisher would take care of the promotion, and I would get to work on my next book.

Wrong. My publisher had left most of the promotion up to me, and it’s even written into my contract that I must promote the book. I’m not trying to blame my publisher for my book promotion woes—promotion by the author is, in fact, the industry norm.

Some writers love the promotion phase. You get out in front of the public, and you’re in the spotlight. I’m not one of these writers. I’m an introvert. That’s one of the reasons I took up writing in the first place. Moreover, I’m a very poor salesman. I hate the idea of trying to persuade anyone to buy something they haven’t decided they want buy on their own.

However, if you don’t promote your book the chances of the book going anywhere are essentially zero. Without promotion, your book just gets put out there in a huge sea of, literally, millions of other books. The chances that your book will be spontaneously “discovered,” miraculously plucked out of that vast sea of books as the next bestseller, are pretty slim.

As far as the most rewarding part of being a published author, that’s easy. Two things. One is just the physical act of having a published book, your book, in your hands. The other thing is having people who’ve read your book tell you they like it—and see they really mean it. That feels good.

Are you married or single and how do you combine the writing life with home life? Do you have support?

I’m married, happily so I might add. My wife, Sandy, and I have been married for nearly eighteen years now.

We have three dogs, no children. My wife works, and many would say we have “interesting” work schedules. Sandy works a typical Monday through Friday week, and her job (she’s an IT consultant) often takes her out of town on business.

I, on the other hand, work as an emergency room doctor as my day job, three days a week, Friday to Sunday. I do my writing Monday through Thursday. Consequently, when I’m at home, Sandy is often away, and when Sandy is at home, I’m at work.

Many people find our conflicting schedules to be pretty odd. “When do you see each other?” they ask. However, it works out fine for us. We often joke that it’s our schedules that has led to our strong marriage. We see each other so rarely we never tire of each other, and when we do see each other it’s a much anticipated treat.

Can you tell us about your latest book and why you wrote it?

Again, Terminal Care is my first novel. It’s a medical thriller. It’s funny, I never thought I would write a medical thriller. I haven’t read many medical thrillers. I was an English major is college, and I studied co-called “serious” literature. I always thought my first book would be a “serious” book.

However, when I first started thinking about writing a book, I was thinking a lot at the time about problems I saw in the way the pharmaceutical industry brought new drugs to market. The safety trials for drugs were often performed by researchers hired by the drug companies, themselves. Imagine, for example, a study funded by the tobacco industry to determine whether or not cigarette smoking is harmful.

Moreover, about this time, there was a lot in the news about a couple drugs that had been brought to market as safe, yet these drugs were now discovered to have serious—even lethal—side effects. There were even suggestions the makers of these drugs had known about the side effects and had covered them up.

This gave me the idea for my book: a novel about a drug company that is in the late stages of bringing a drug to market when the company discovers there’s a serious problem with the drug. The company decides to cover-up the problem and to push ahead with bringing the drug to market, anyway.

This plot line led me naturally into a medical thriller. And, I have no regrets about having written a thriller rather than that “serious” novel. As it turned out, writing a thriller was a lot of fun. A lot more fun, I think, than writing that “serious” novel would have been.

Can you share an excerpt?

Sure. This is from the first few pages of the first chapter.

CHAPTER 1

The death itself wasn’t the unusual thing. The unusual thing was we tried to stop it. That first dying heart came on a Thursday night, a little after midnight on May 5^th. I remember the date because it was Cinco de Mayo, a Mexican holiday. There’d been celebrations all day long in San Francisco, including in the Presidio where I was working that night.

I was one of two physicians on duty in the ER at Deaconess Hospital, doing the overnight shift, 6 PM to 6 AM. The early part of the shift had been busy. When I arrived at six o’clock, the waiting room was bursting with patients: drunken revelers with lacerations and sprained ankles, tourists with sunburns, picnickers vomiting from food poisoning, six members of a mariachi band with heat stroke and dehydration. We worked fast, moving from one stretcher to the next, seeing the most critical patients first and moving on.

Then, around ten o’clock, the flow of new patients stopped—abruptly, like water from a faucet turned from on to off. By 11:00 PM, there were only four patients in the waiting room. By 11:45, I finished sewing up my last laceration: a three-inch gash on the forehead of an intoxicated coed from San Francisco State.

Then, there was no one. The emergency department had gone from chaos to serenity.

With nothing to do, Hansen, the other physician on duty, went to catch a nap in the staff lounge. I washed up and went over to join Bill—the night nurse—at the nursing station. We sat with our feet up, drinking black coffee from Styrofoam cups, looking across the empty row of stretcher beds. Bill launched nostalgically into a pornographic tale about a buxom nurse he’d known while serving as a medic during the Gulf War. He’d just reached the climax—so to speak—of his story when, suddenly, the calm of the night was interrupted by an announcement over the intercom:

“Code Blue, East Annex, back station! Code Blue, East Annex, back station! ”

“Christ,” Bill said stopping short in his story. “East Annex? That’s the Alzheimer’s unit.”

“Yeah,” I said. Bill and I exchanged puzzled looks.

“Since when do they call Code Blues on the Alzheimer’s unit?” Bill asked.

The announcement came again, sounding now more urgent. “Code Blue, East Annex! Code Blue!” It was an urgent call for help, hospital jargon for, “Come quick, someone’s trying to die.” And, at that hour of the night, it was the duty of the ER doctor to come and stop the dying. Or at least to try.

I jumped up and grabbed the “Code bag,” the big black duffel bag filled with the equipment we’d need to run the Code: defibrillator unit, intubation tubes, cardiac meds.

“Let’s go,” I said.

“But I was just getting to the good part of my story,” Bill said.

“Save it for later.”

We ran out of the emergency department down the long connector tunnel leading to the East Annex. Why were they calling a Code Blue on the East Annex? I wondered as we ran. In my three years of working at Deaconess, this was the first time I’d been called to a Code on the annex. Normally, they didn’t run Code Blues on the Alzheimer’s ward. The patients there were “DNR”—“Do Not Resuscitate.” In other words, when a patient on the annex stopped breathing or went into cardiac arrest, nothing was to be done. No medical heroics. No breathing machines, no cardiac stimulants, no shocking the heart. This was considered the humane thing to do. All the patients on the annex had at least moderately advanced Alzheimer’s disease; all were near the end of life. To prolong the lives of these poor souls at all costs was not the aim of medical care on the East Annex. The aim of medical care on the East Annex was comfort, a safe environment, and, when the time came, death with dignity.

I heard Bill huffing and puffing, falling behind as we ran down the hall. I turned back and saw him slow to a walk.

“I’ll have to…meet…you…” he said breathlessly.

“Maybe if you give up those damn cigarettes,” I called back as I went around the bend in the tunnel.

“Maybe if…I was…a damn jogger like you,” Bill called out.

At the end of the connector, I came to the door leading to the second floor of the annex. Normally, the door was shut and locked. The East Annex was a locked ward because the patients there—at least the ones who were ambulatory—had a habit of wandering off the ward and getting lost when the doors weren’t locked. Now, as I reached the end of the connector, a rotund, uniformed security guard stood at the door holding it open for me. “Straight ahead, past the back station, on the left,” the guard said.

I went through the door and immediately someone shouted out. “Over here!”

I ran to where six or seven people were gathered outside one of the rooms. There’s always a crowd at any Code Blue. Death, either actual or imminent, is always something that fascinates people. Several of the people in the crowd had no business being there: for example, the ward secretary standing on her tiptoes peering in at the door and the two members of the janitorial staff looking over her shoulder.

Elbowing my way into the room, I got my first look at the patient: an elderly, gray-skinned woman wearing pink pajamas.

Where’s your favorite place to write at home?

I have a room at our house which I call my “study.” It’s a quiet place downstairs with bookshelves and a piano. The room is in the front of the house, and my desk faces out into the front yard garden through French doors.

I can just barely see the street from my desk. It’s a quiet street, and mainly I see neighbors walking by from time-to-time with their dogs. For the most part, however, the view is of purple-leafed canna lilies, red-flowered azaleas, and the front yard water fountain covered by a jasmine vine.

It’s a fantastic place to write.

What is one thing about your book that makes it different from other books on the market?

I’d have to say it’s the book’s emphasis on exposing some of the more unsavory practices of the pharmaceutical industry. This topic has certainly been tackled in works of non-fiction. Marcia Angell’s book, The Truth About Drug Companies, comes immediately to mind. In addition, I know certain works of fiction have taken on the topic obliquely, for example, The Constant Gardener by John le Carré.

However, as far as I know, my book is one of the few works of fiction that takes the reader right into the middle of a clinical drug trail and, thereby, exposes many of the inherent conflicts of interest commonly associated with pharmaceutical research as performed today.

Tables are turned…what is one thing you’d like to say to your audience who might buy your book one day?

After all the talk above about research and pharmaceutical drug trials, let me just say this to the reader. Don’t worry, the book is not a dry, technical, medical critique. The book is written in simple English by a plain-spoken, first-person narrator. There’s a good bit of humor in the book. There’s a strong, female protagonist, the heroine of the book. There’s even a love story.

So, for anyone worried about the book being overly medical, forget it. This is a fast-paced, easy-to-read novel for everyone. No medical background needed.

Thank you for this interview, Chris. Good luck on your virtual book tour!

Thank you. My pleasure.

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How do you make sales happen for you?

A lot of hard work! I sponsor a lot of on line parties, festivals and contests. Book sales don’t magically happen, believe me. An author has to work hard to earn her readers. And then she has to work hard to keep them by giving them something they’ll enjoy reading. I try hard to make my books worth a reader’s time.

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