HOW MY WORK INFLUENCES MY WRITING – Cristina LePort

I have been a physician for longer than 40 years, but I just became an author. When I look back at my journey, I can see how my second passion was born from my first profession like a child from a mother’s womb, with the difference that in my case my work and my writing will continue to be forever intertwined long after I retire from medicine.

I was born in Italy and had a classic education. I hated writing, perhaps due to the fact that I detested the assigned subjects. After graduating from Medical School, I came to the USA to specialize in Internal Medicine. I barely spoke English. 

It was during my mid-life crisis as an Internist, 20 years later, that my passion for writing first manifested. I had gotten tired of practicing Primary Care and needed new challenges. As I was applying to Cardiology fellowship programs, I read The Art of Fiction by Ayn Rand. I started to write fiction myself and suddenly I was drawn into a wonderful world of my choice, where everything could happen according to my wishes, and I created characters I wanted to meet. The world of my choice was the one I had inhabited and loved for 20-plus years: the medical world. I never had any questions or doubts about my genre: I was a writer of medical thrillers.

The medical world is an ideal backdrop for thrillers for several reasons. It is bursting with life-or-death emergencies. Medical thrillers count on our fear of illness, something everyone has to face, and make us ponder our own mortality. Several of the qualities defining a good doctor overlap with what makes a successful author, such as the ability to “read” people, meticulous work in confronting high-stakes situations, investigative talent, and the ability to integrate many clues into a meaningful sum. No doubt, medicine and sleuthing have a lot in common: mystery, the pressure of time, and the collection of evidence until the answer is found. 

One day, after a few years of tutoring, coaching, and rejections of my firsts few attempts at graduating to an official author, I saw a commercial on TV about a medication used to treat heart attacks. A man opened a card while a voice said “Wouldn’t be nice if we got a notice when a heart attack is going to strike, so we can prevent it?” I thought that was a great idea for a medical thriller. And it was smack at the center of my new specialty: Cardiology. My new book would open with people getting a card with the warning: “Your heart attack will arrive within one hour!” That’s how DISSECTION started. 

A dissection is the splitting of the layers of an artery. The powerful pressure of arterial blood pushes through a breach in the wall and opens a tunnel separating the layers like velcro, obstructing branches as it encroaches them, causing the death of tissue in various organs. Finally, the artery gives in, bursts open, and causes the patient’s death from massive arterial bleeding. Although this is a relatively infrequent event in a cardiologist’s daily practice, due to the often-catastrophic nature, dissections are often unforgettable.

I still remember arranging for emergency transport and following the ambulance in my car like in an action movie after diagnosing a patient with a massively dilated and dissected aorta, hanging by a thread and ready to burst. What a good, scary story for a thriller! No wonder my third novel was the one that at last found an agent and a publisher.

 Of course, it took me some time to construct the entire plot around that card. I walked around for months with different ideas churning and colliding in my mind, trying to focus on my real patients during office hours. I missed several freeway exits while driving. I woke up in the middle of the night to jot down ideas that materialized like magic in my head while I slept. Writing was the easy, fun part. After all, medicine is my bread and butter. 

Getting my book published, on the other hand, was the most difficult thing I have ever accomplished in my life. It was tougher than medical school, more challenging than raising 3 children, and harder than getting accepted to a cardiology fellowship at the age of 48. Saving patients’ lives, in comparison, was a walk in the park. 

Another reason medicine makes a good background for a thriller is that it is conducive to “what ifs…,” involving technologies and treatments at the edge of what may be possible, but not quite available yet, which enhances interest and suspense. In my books, I love to stretch the available medical technology to create interesting tension and scary plots. Sometimes, like in the case of DISSECTION, it takes so long for the publishing journey to unfold, that by the time the book gets published, the technology may be already available. In the case of DISSECTION, the described technology is now currently used to treat arterial blockages. Thank goodness the book is at last being distributed. 

Now I can finally wear a great t-shirt a friend gave me. I saved it for this moment of triumph because it symbolizes the fusion of my two passions. On the front it says: “A semicolon is not a medical condition.” 

More often than I expected, I find myself having to explain what it means. 

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