In 1993, I was a respiratory therapist in the ER and ICU floors of a major hospital in Cleveland. I had no training, nor had I ever been in a hospital before. My tenure lasted one week. I had been asked to leave graduate school in computer science (they said I could come back when I was “more mature” and I still have not gone back) at Carnegie Mellon University, and was working as a computer programmer at CMU when I got a call out of the blue from a doctor at the hospital. He was the father of my girlfriend’s sister’s boyfriend and he heard that I liked to write.

He felt the entire medical industry was too motivated by greed and wanted to reveal all, but without using his name. He wanted me to write a medical thriller based on his experiences. He was a renown heart surgeon and brought a sense of urgency to the project because he had a very rare blood disease and had between six and 12 months to live. Aside from his wife, I was the only one who knew.