What does an ER doctor/thriller novelist do all day?

8 p.m., Tues. May 3 Normally I’d be going to bed around now, reading myself to sleep before getting up for my regular 4 a.m. shift as an emergency physician at St. Paul’s Hospital in downtown Vancouver. But tonight I’m doing a worldwide virtual launch of my 13th novel, The Darkness in the Light, on Facebook Live. Published by Simon & Schuster Canada, it’s a dark psychological thriller that revolves around a spate of suicides in a remote Alaskan town. It explores the hot-button medical issue of virtual medicine, which I wanted to write about, and covers themes of remoteness, medical specialist shortages and mental healthcare, which have become hugely important as we emerge from the pandemic. It’s a locked-room mystery in the Nordic noir style with a unique twist that I’ve never seen used before. Early feedback has been great. The Globe & Mail, for example, ran a very positive review of the book over the weekend, calling it “the perfect post-COVID thriller” and including it on a must-read list for this summer of six “seriously creepy mysteries.” That’s music to my ears! In addition to tonight’s launch, when I’ll do a reading and then a Q & A with friend and fellow writer Robyn Harding, I’ll be up at the crack of dawn tomorrow for a live interview on CTV’s national Your Morning Show. I’ve got more interviews and public readings slated after that, so no clinic work for me this week. Read: What do sole overnight ER docs do all night? 4 a.m. My regular five-hour, early-morning shift in the ER has been one of the cornerstones of my medical career and the backstop of my writing life for many years. It’s miserable getting up at 3 a.m., but once you get going there’s never a dull moment in a busy ER unit in a big hospital like St. Paul’s. Our roughly 60 ER doctors and 150 nurses see between 85,000 to 90,000 patients a year, which makes our department the third-busiest among Metro Vancouver hospitals, after Vancouver General and Surrey Memorial. 10 a.m. When my shift ends I usually spend an hour tying up loose ends, then put on my third hat as department head. It’s a ten-year position that I’ve held for the past nine years. Mostly I put out fires and handle complaints and issues that arise, such as a recent one about weapons coming into the hospital. We’re also close to breaking ground on a new $2-billion facility next door that is set to open in 2026, so you can imagine all the problem solving and horse trading that goes on over with that, as well as the regular day-to-day issues we deal with. As department head, I’m very proud of the fact that we are the fastest ER department in Western Canada, with a wait time to see a doctor of less than one hour. I credit that success to the fact that we focus on the patient and are very proactive. We know people don’t want to linger in an ER, and we think it’s inhumane to make someone wait in pain when they don’t have to. One very successful innovation we introduced was the creation of a rapid assessment zone with a pod of dedicated beds. I love the fast-changing pace of being an ER physician. And working overnight complements my daytime writing and administration schedules. The joy of my existence is that, with three jobs, nothing’s ever the same from one day to the next. It’s perfect for someone who is ADHD like me. 11 a.m. If I’m not still at the hospital I’m at home for lunch. I then tuck into writing. I live not far from where I was born and raised in the west side of Vancouver. In fact, I’ve spent most of my life in a 5-km radius from there. Nowadays I live in the same town as my two young-adult daughters—Chelsea and Ashley—who are studying to become lawyers. That’s a big change in a Jewish family that is chock full of physicians. My maternal grandfather was a small-town GP in the former Czechoslovakia. In the winter of 1939, my grandmother tricked him into going to London—on the last plane to leave Prague before the Nazis arrived—to attend a medical conference that wasn’t. My mother, Judy, trained as a physician in London. She eventually made it to Vancouver, where a Jewish group set up her up on a blind date with my late father, Frank Kalla. Frank too was an immigrant from Hungary, where he spent much of his teens living under Nazi terror and became a surgeon after the war. When he got to Vancouver in the late 1950s he had to recertify as a family doctor, something he did for the next 30 years but was never really passionate about, unlike surgery. The youngest of three brothers, I studied medicine here at UBC. I immediately fell for emergency medicine, which I found to be fun and exciting and perfectly suited to my short attention span. After doing a year at Dalhousie University in Halifax, I returned home and began working in the now-defunct local community ER of St. Vincent’s that was absorbed into the fold of St. Paul’s in 1998. I was working fulltime at St. Paul’s when, on a lark, two friends and I decided to take a night class in screen writing at Simon Fraser University. By luck our teacher was Michael McKinley, a gifted writer who soon became both a mentor and friend. Amazingly, our very first draft for a screenplay—a black comedy set in a hospice—got optioned by a local production company. That early success spurred me on, and I started writing novels. I wrote two medical thrillers before one of them—called Pandemic—was picked up by an American publisher in 2004, right after SARS hit Toronto and Vancouver. The timing was perfect, and sales of the paperback went through the roof. In fact, it’s still my most commercially successful book. I’ve been churning books out regularly since then. Most of them are medical suspense and psychological thrillers. I also wrote a historical trilogy I’m very proud of about German Jews in Shanghai. It required a ton of research and, unknowingly for me at the time, it paralleled my father’s experiences under the Nazis in Hungary. To date I’ve sold between 500,000 and 750,000 copies of my first 12 books. Four or five have been optioned for films and they’ve been translated in to ten languages, including Greek and Bulgarian. I’ve got high hopes for novel No. 13. Regardless, I plan to keep writing. I really do love it. I’ve always been a very competitive and focused person. I was into competitive tennis and skiing when I was young, and I played hockey and have always stayed in shape. These days I ride my spin bike (I can’t write or even think well without a good ride!), I have a personal trainer and I work out five times a week. I don’t write every day. But when I get into a new story, I get that momentum going and—well, that’s everything. I stick at it until it’s done. The sheer volume of books I’ve written and the public readings I do has led to a growing base of fans, including some who show up in the ER. One notable one was a fully delusional woman who suddenly stopped to say she’d read all of my books. I’ve also had to convince a good-natured head nurse that she was not the inspiration for a not-so-nice character in one of my books with the same name—a coincidence that arose because an editor changed the character’s name without my knowing. The people I work with are incredibly supportive of my writing career. And I hope and fully expect to continue combining my medical and literary careers for many years to come.—As told to Mark Cardwell

What does an ER doctor/thriller novelist do all day?

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