Healer (43 page)

How do you maintain a sense of balance between fiction writing and your medical career?

Well, if you envision balance as standing in the middle of a seesaw or bongo board, you know it’s not a static point. It’s a continual shifting of weight and muscle, taking and giving and sometimes failing. I work at both endeavors part time, which seems to add up to one and a half jobs! One advantage of my medical specialty, anesthesiology, is that my direct patient care responsibilities largely begin and end in the operating room, so when I’m off duty I’m not worried about my patients and can more easily immerse myself in what I’m writing. But medicine and fiction are more complementary than might be obvious—after all, look at the number of exceptional plays and poetry and novels that have been authored by doctors, from Chekov to Carlos Williams to Verghese.

I had a literature professor in college who said, “Without death there would be no poetry!” I’m not sure I agree with that—even immortal teenagers can get mighty emotional. But I do see patients every day who have been cheated out of decades of life, and writing is an outlet I use to make sense of the inequality of biological fate. And when I take a longer view of these two mixed careers, I recognize that staying challenged on more than one front keeps me from getting complacent about who I am and what I am capable of doing. As long as I have certain constants in my life, like my family, I love to surprise myself by testing my limits.

What are you working on now? Do you have plans to write another book?

I have succumbed to the personal fact that my need to write is similar to being infected with a chronic virus. It seems to be the only cure for quieting the incessant narration of life that goes on in my head. Within a week of figuring out the ending to
Healer
I heard some new characters dancing around in there, and they’ve already begun their journey.