How Being A Doctor Inspires My Writing By Mahi Cheshire

How Being A Doctor Inspires My Writing

By Mahi Cheshire

The first writing I did as a doctor was on ward rounds. Myself and a group of other new juniors rushed to scribble down our consultant’s directions in files of patient notes balanced on our knees, on bedside tables, the nurses’ station, wherever we could find, as we trailed them from bed to bed. And the things we were writing about? Serious illnesses, infections, injuries. Imminent death. No processing was afforded by the black and white ‘doctors speak’ abbreviations we noted down. Even certifying a death was reduced to little more than ‘RIP.’ It was around this time I turned to writing of my own. Many doctors before have done the same, going on to produce memoirs or nonfiction accounts of life at the hospital. It makes sense, writing is, after all, a way to process.

For me, I didn’t want to record my day-to-day experiences in my job. I was content to leave that at work when the hospital doors shut.  Instead, I started writing fiction.  

What started as an experiment turned into a romance novel set in Dubai which I had visited just before my first medical job. Something which felt a million miles from my daily reality. That novel didn’t make it off my hard drive but it was helpful nonetheless, in providing the escapism I needed while my subconscious could process the things we saw for long shifts, sometimes more than twelve hours at a time, for weekends, nights and days in a row. Night shifts were often the most challenging and a seven-day stretch of those gave me no time or headspace to write as I pulled myself from sleep to work and back again.  But on the post-nights days off I would bring out my laptop for brief intervals and go back to my novel.

It took some time before I was able to directly write about the hospital, something I realise with the benefit of hindsight. Once I thought I’d left the acute medical on calls behind, I started my debut novel Deadly Cure, in earnest. There is a lot of acute medical drama in the story and I could not have written it while I was living it.

For me at least, distance helps me to write objectively. The first version of the novel was a different beast, less psychological thriller and more new adult with a conspiracy subplot and a lot of venting about my experiences, the hours, the exhaustion and the poor pay, the general craziness of it all. An outlet for the discontent I and so many of my fellow junior doctors voiced on a daily basis while plodding on, determined to finish our training, hoping things got better on the other side. 

The original brief for this article was how medicine inspired my writing. The answer is, indirectly. I have never written directly about patients I have seen as this never felt right to me. Deadly Cure, like most of my writing, is pure fiction. My work as a doctor inspired me in a more indirect way. The feelings associated with patients I’d seen or incidents I experienced at work stayed with me and made it into my novels, though unrecognisable from the events that inspired it, even to me. I couldn’t even identify exactly which incidents inspired which sections in my writing. But it’s there, the cardiac arrest scene in the opening is distinct in its circumstances and characters, but in it are the multiple such arrest calls I’ve attended for so many patients, many of whom sadly didn’t survive.

The bleary groggy feeling of the night shifts in the book-let’s just say I’ve been there. With a bit of artistic license, I took the disorientation of night shifts and the unsettling feeling of seeing a normally busy hospital corridor devoid of people, and used it to accentuate my protagonist Rea’s feelings of discomfort and peril as she runs between wards at night, unsure exactly what is going on there.

Happily I never encountered the kind of cut throat rivalry that affects Rea and Julia, the medical school best friends and mortal frenemies whose falling out over a job drives the plot of Deadly Cure. But the lift I encountered in one hospital I worked, with a basement floor none of us could access, sparked an idea that developed into a plot in the novel which is far removed from reality. The real, diverse nature of the NHS workforce which I didn’t see represented in novels, I chose to portray in Deadly Cure. The camaraderie among the overworked staff is there too. The ethical dilemmas I witnessed regularly, especially in the care of the elderly wards, expanded in my novel and became the moral grey areas that underpin it.

For me, first and foremost, writing helped me process a challenging job and experiences I couldn’t put into words directly. The only way was to distance myself from them through a fictionalized version of things I’d seen, an amalgamation of experiences. The result in my debut is far from gritty realism, more an escapist, roller coaster ride of a novel. What I have realized through the process of writing it, is one of those universal truths, that fiction can contain a lot of fact. Just not always in the way I anticipated.

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DEADLY CURE

‘This is a thrilling story with a compelling hook’ ADELE PARKS

‘Grabs the reader by the heart from the first pages and ramps up the tension to the last. A stellar, shivers-down-the-spine debut’ ERIN KELLY

THE HIPPOCRATIC OATH: FIRST, DO NO HARM…

Dr Rea Dharmasena is devastated when she loses out on her dream research job to her med-school rival and best friend, Dr Julia Stone.

To add insult to injury, Julia used Rea’s own cutting-edge research to get it.

But just as Rea finds it in her to forgive the betrayal, Julia, after a life-changing medical discovery, is found murdered.

Now Rea has the dream job she’s always wanted.

But at what cost?

Perfect for fans of The Silent Patient and The Holiday, this is a heart-stopping thriller of betrayal, secrets and ruthless ambition that will leave you breathless.
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Mahi Cheshire was born in Sri Lanka and grew up in London. She works as a GP and has a degree in Psychology. She loves travelling, kundalini yoga and boxing, all of which provide inspiration for her writing. She lives in London with her husband and daughter.

Follow her on Twitter @MahiCheshire

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing