Where the Heck Did You Come Up With That?

People have asked where the idea for The Mad Hatter’s Son came from. My first response is a very strange mind that tends to fixate on weird things. While that is true, the inspiration for the story came from a patient I helped care for some years ago.

She was a young teenager with very puzzling neurological symptoms. We saw her a few times in the OR for a central line insertion (back when they did those in the OR) and a gastrostomy tube placement, but several of our anesthesiologists also covered the ICU, so we heard a lot about her.

It took the ICU docs quite some time to identify what was causing her symptoms. While the plot of my book is not about this patient, it is about a difficult to identify cause for an illness. I thought at the time, that it would make a great plot line and began writing the story.

Life interrupted, as it often does, with a new job, a new husband, and then five years later a daughter. So the story got put aside. Many years later, after a divorce, my daughter growing up and moving out, and a move to a new house I found the original few chapters and thought, I still really like this. So with time available and fewer obligations I began to write. The Mad Hatter’s Son is the result.