My special guest on this last Monday of March is thriller author Tammy Euliano. We’re chatting about her new medical thriller, Fatal Intent.
Bio:
By day, Tammy Euliano, MD is a Professor of Anesthesiology and Obstetrics & Gynecology at the University of Florida where she cares for patients, teaches medical students and residents, performs research, and invents cool stuff. She’s been honored with numerous teaching awards, more than 100,000 views of her YouTube teaching videos, and was featured in a calendar of women inventors (copies available wherever you buy your out-of-date planners).
By night, she plays games with her family (now remotely), plays tennis (badly), cuddles her dogs, reads, and writes medical thrillers. In her writing, she is intrigued by ethically blurry topics and enjoys positioning characters on all sides of a debate, each with a well-reasoned position…or humor…or dogs.
Vacations are for exploring our amazing world. She has dragged her family of five to all the major US national parks, Alaska, Hawaii, Canada, Costa Rica, the Caribbean, the Galapagos, the Mediterranean, Europe and New Zealand. Trips are spent soaking up the history and culture while also experiencing nature, often in extreme fashion.
Welcome, Tammy. Please tell us about your current release.
Fatal Intent is about Dr. Kate Downey, a young anesthesiologist at an academic medical center who’s having a tough year. When she learns of her elderly patients dying at home days after minor surgery, she wants to know why, but the surgeon, not so much. He says that “Old people die, that’s what they do,” and when she presses, he blames her and reports her accusation.
Unfortunately Kate is on probation for an earlier incident, and the chief of staff sides with the surgeon, leaving her desperate to prove her innocence. With her husband in a prolonged coma, her career is all she has left. Except she also has her eccentric Great Aunt Irm, who moved in after her husband’s accident, and her beloved black Lab, Shadow.
As she begins to investigate, a medical student, and the lawyer son of a victim, help, but things heat up as they close in on the culprit’s identity and the stakes couldn’t be higher when Kate has to make some excruciating choices.
It brings up issues related to how we manage the end of life, and hopefully will stimulate conversation amongst family members to make their wishes known.
What inspired you to write this book?
The idea of managing the end-of-life has fascinated me since way before any kid should think about such things. We had a debate in my 5th grade class about the fate of Karen Ann Quinlan, a young woman in a persistent vegetative state whose parents wanted her ventilator disconnected, while the State of New Jersey disagreed. I don’t recall what side my 10-year-old-self argued, but the question never left me. Medical technology and the ability to keep the body alive has far out-paced our ethical ability to deal with the implications.
In medical school and residency, the question resurfaced repeatedly, while watching families’ extended mourning in the ICU, and anesthetizing patients for innumerable procedures despite little to no hope of a meaningful recovery. Meanwhile, the absurd cost of medical care in the US frequently made the news, especially expenditures in the last few months of life and final hospitalization.
Actually getting words on the page took a bit longer. After writing an introductory anesthesia textbook with my mentor, we decided to continue our teamwork with a novel. Sadly he fell ill and passed away, but I had the bug and found the time to start Fatal Intent.
What exciting story are you working on next?
The sequel to Fatal Intent in which Kate Downey, Aunt Irm and Christian face another series of challenging circumstances is due asap. I’m also working on another series. Pre-COVID I wrote about a bioengineered virus that destroyed the fertility of humans and other primates. Sort of Children of Men-ish, minus the soul-crushing fate of mankind that PD James described. Anyway, I LOVE the themes, the characters and the challenging topics raised, but have yet to interest an agent or publisher.
When did you first consider yourself a writer?
I’ve been writing since grade school. I recently came across some first grade stories about lady bug and lions that my mother had saved. Throughout my career I’ve done much technical writing, but I guess it depends on the definition of writer. The way I thought of it during the long slog to get published, was that I’m a writer, writing stories, until I get published, then I can call myself an author. So I guess I first considered myself a writer when I began Fatal Intent those many years ago.
Do you write full-time? If so, what’s your work day like? If not, what do you do other than write and how do you find time to write?
I am a physician, so no, I don’t write full-time, unless writing history and physical exams and orders in medical charts counts. I work three days a week as an anesthesiologist. On those days I get little to no writing done, unless my husband has plans with the guys in the evening. All the other days, I write as much as I can. Early morning and late evening I seem to be most productive, but on weekdays I try to write all day, with breaks to walk the dogs and manage the house. I need to experiment with time-blocking, assigning certain periods to different writing tasks, to see if it makes me more efficient than just working on something until my brain is fried, then turning to something else.
What would you say is your interesting writing quirk?
Much of my writing is done standing outside with my laptop on a stand and a “Chuck-it” tucked under my arm. I throw a tennis ball for my dog. Thanks to the chuck-it, the ball goes far enough for me to write while she retrieves it, hides it in a nearby (or not so nearby) bush when I’m not looking, then whines at me to throw it again, which requires that I search for the ball (or ask my other dog who sometimes finds it for me, unless he’s too busy with a bone), then start the routine over again. In between, I write.
As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
Oh my, the best answer I’ve heard for this question is “A fire truck.” But for me, I don’t think I had a specific career in mind, only that I had an unrealistic sense of my future value (thanks Dad) and knew I was supposed to do something to change the world for the better. I went through the usual astronaut phase, and actually worked on a research project in college that was supposed to go up in a shuttle until the first explosion. At some point I think I said I wanted to study the biology of extraterrestrials – that would have been a real money-maker. Interestingly, I never considered being a doctor and went to medical school intending to perform medical research and cure cancer or Alzheimer’s, until I realized that research is infinitesimal painstaking steps toward a small goal that may or may not contribute to something that could, many years down the road, accomplish something. And that no matter how hard I worked, my piece of the puzzle might turn out to be irrelevant. Oh, and I hated killing rats. It was a rather jaded view based on the labs in which I worked, but thank God there are dedicated people who love that work. Though if they love killing rats I might watch out for them.
Anything additional you want to share with the readers?
I hope Fatal Intent will stimulate discussion about meaningful life and compassionate death. The book provides no answers, nor do I have a strong opinion, only that end-of-life is a discussion we need to have, both in our homes with our loved ones, and on a national stage. Please go online and complete a Living Will and Health Care surrogacy or power of attorney. There are resource links on my website.
Links:
Website | Facebook | Instagram | Goodreads | Amazon | IndieBound
Thanks for joining me today, Tammy.