Radiology residents having sex in the call room. A drug-addicted chief resident and corrupt administrators. Quenching MRI magnets. It's all in a day's work for Doctored Images, a new novel penned by a North Carolina radiologist that features a shocking twist: a radiologist as a crime-fighting good guy.
Doctored Images covers the exploits of Dr. Bo Richards, a second-year radiology resident at Boulder Community Hospital in Colorado. Bo is a nice guy with a dark past ... a girlfriend who died tragically in a car accident on a remote road in the Rocky Mountains. But was it really an accident? Bo's life starts to unravel as he begins to unveil the truth, with the story taking more twists and turns than a tortuous coronary artery.
Dr. Robert Sherrier, author of Doctored Images.The book is the product of Dr. Robert Sherrier, chief of radiology at the Durham Veterans Affairs Medical Center and an assistant professor of radiology at Duke University. Writing a novel has always been a personal goal, one he attacked with the same methodical intensity as the triathlons he trains for in the rest of his free time.
"I just always wanted to write books. I read a thriller a week -- medical, legal, whatever," Sherrier told AuntMinnie.com. "And every time I put one down, I thought, 'I could do a better job.' I just always had the bug."
Mrs. Adcock seized his arm. "I can't get any air," she croaked, and then she blacked out.
"Where's all the emergency equipment?" Bo tried to hold back the panic. "You can do this," he said to himself. He remembered passing oxygen tanks on his way to the MRI center. He rushed into the control room and heard Rosie calling the code. He ran out of the MRI suite and into the hallway, where he spotted a cart of the familiar green cylinders. Bo picked one up like a football and rushed back to his patient. Suddenly Bo felt a strange tug on the tank in his arm and briefly thought Rosie had bumped into him. As he took one more step toward Mrs. Adcock, the canister was ripped out of his hands.
A shriek pierced the air as the room went dark. "You idiot," Rosie shouted. "That oxygen tank wasn't supposed to come in here."
Doctored Images deals primarily with Bo's struggles at Boulder Community, both in moving on after his girlfriend's death and in making a good impression in the hospital's radiology department, where he's struggling to learn the nuances of radiology -- such as the fact that MRI suites are not good places for ferromagnetic oxygen canisters.
Bo's woes continue when a young Mexican woman named Marisol is detained on suspicion of smuggling drugs at Denver International Airport. Mysteriously, she is released after undergoing an x-ray exam at the airport, despite the fact that she ingested dozens of small packets of cocaine just prior to boarding the flight.
What does drug smuggling have to do with radiology? And how do Bo and Marisol cross paths? You'll have to read the book, which is available on Amazon.com under the imprint of Abbott Press, a self-publishing firm, to find out.
Vince Flickinger stepped around the crowd and bumped his way to the computer monitors. He leaned over and whispered an apology to Bo before turning around, revealing his perfect blond hair, sharp eyes, and knowing smile.
Like an actor delivering a dramatic soliloquy, he said, "I see that the patient suffered a clavicle fracture -- a couple of months ago by the looks of it. I heard Ms. Strong say he is a ski instructor. I've known a few myself, and they don't make very much money. To keep working through the pain, I suspect he spends a lot of time in the hot tub -- both before he goes out into the cold and after a lesson."
Vince turned to Cindy and gestured like a magician to his assistant.
"Uh. Yeah," she stammered. "He did mention something about that. His stomach can't tolerate Motrin."
Vince continued. "Ladies and gentlemen, this is a textbook case of hot tub lung." Vince bowed and rested his hand on Cindy's shoulder. She actually blushed.
"We'll take that under consideration, Dr. Flickinger," Perfect said in an annoyed tone. He ripped his stethoscope off his neck, shoved it in his coat pocket, and stormed out of the room.
As the medical team began filing out, Bo stood up and shook Vince's hand. "That was an amazing call."
Vince shrugged. "You know what they say, Bo: the answer is always on the film."
Sherrier said one of his motivations for the book was to portray radiologists differently than how they usually appear in the mainstream media -- as lazy, aloof physicians found more often on the golf course than in the reading room. Obviously, these portrayals are inaccurate, and they often get important details about radiology wrong, such as providing inverted x-rays or basic misunderstandings about how radiology works.
Doctored Images covers the exploits of radiology resident Dr. Bo Richards.Instead, Sherrier wanted to write a novel where the protagonist uses his knowledge of radiology to solve the crime. While Doctored Images is written for the general public, radiology professionals will appreciate many of the details that involve medical imaging, such as what happens when an MRI magnet quenches. Indeed, it may be the first novel in which a reconstructed 3D CT image holds the clues to busting the bad guys.
"Wait," Bo shouted, startling Lisa, who reflexively backed away. "Sorry. I didn't mean to yell," Bo said. Looking at Findley, he asked, "Do you have 3D capability here?"
"We have all the fancy bells and whistles."
"Good. Load the CT data into your 3D program, please."
The two watched Dr. Findley turn back to the computer, click a couple of buttons, and then sit back. "This will take a minute to load. What are you looking for?"
"I'm not sure," Bo said. "I've seen some pretty amazing things with this technique. At the university we have a setting called surface rendering, which displays the surface of the patient's body in three dimensions. On some patients it's almost pornographic. Once I could read the lettering on a patient's shirt. It was raised just enough that the surface program picked it up.
Findley added, "One of the CT techs I know calls it a 'package check.' When you put the 3D images up, you can tell how well-endowed the patient is. The detail is amazing."
How does a busy radiologist find time to write? Sherrier is an early riser, and he typically reserves the hours between 5 a.m. and 7 a.m. for writing. His goal is to turn in about 500 words a day, which puts him on course to complete a 100,000-word book in about 200 days.
He was helped along the path by several courses on fiction writing for doctors, such as ones by the late Michael Palmer and physician-turned-novelist Tess Gerritsen. Sherrier chose the self-publishing route due to the difficulty that first-time novelists have just in getting an agent, let alone a publisher. He paid Abbott Press a fee that included copy editing, revisions, and a cover, and they print copies as books are ordered.
The pages of Doctored Images are sprinkled with sex and drugs -- indeed, the very premise of the book is based on drug smuggling -- but Sherrier says he's a "conservative guy" who did most of his research about the drug trade on the Internet and by watching movies.
As for the sex -- well, that just comes with the territory for the thriller genre, he said. None of the radiology departments he's worked in -- including the real-life Boulder Community Hospital -- see the kind of extracurricular activity found in the pages of Doctored Images. "But it's nice to fantasize about it, isn't it?" he said.
Sherrier said that none of the characters are based on people he's encountered in real life, although some of his friends and colleagues have asked if they appear in the book in fictional form. That said, the very idea for the book -- smugglers who pack illegal drugs into their bodies to get past authorities -- is based on a 2007 clinical study by Algra et al on "body packers" that was published in the American Journal of Roentgenology (August 2007, Vol. 189:2, pp. 331-336).
Doctored Images comes just in time for the summer reading season, and that fits Sherrier's conception of the book as a light read, something you might enjoy on a plane or on vacation. He's already working on a second novel, one in which Bo takes on a serial killer. (But perhaps the most important question should be, will Bo pass the core exam?)
Ultimately, while Doctored Images alone may not turn Robert Sherrier into this generation's Robin Cook or Michael Crichton, it could be the first step to bigger things.
"If I have a readership following, then it's a lot easier with the second book," Sherrier said. "There are lots of examples of people who self-published their first book and then went on to secure a traditional publisher for the second."
