The Patient

Unlike any of my other stories, The Patient started with a "What if?" (see writing tips) that didn't involve any particular issue in medicine. "What if the most mysterious, ruthless, brilliant assassin in the world had a brain tumor and needed surgery?" I believe it is, along with The Sisterhood, the strongest premise I have concocted. In order to make the story work, I spent much of three months following my friend, Dr. Eben Alexander, around. Alex is a brilliant scientist and neurosurgeon, in addition to being a compassionate and involved physician. I watched as he told patients their operation had succeeded, and told others that, unfortunately, their cancer had regrown. I stood in the operating room for many hours watching him operate incredibly complex machinery while he was painstakingly dissecting out a tumor from a patient's brain. Much of who Jessie Copeland is in this novel, she owes to Alex. The notion to delve into robotics is what ultimately pulled this book together. I want to take total credit for the idea, but I think the initial germ of it came from Dr. Alexander. I read as much as I could to find out about medical robotics, and spent hours sketching the electronic beastie that would become ARTIE in the book.

For more than a year, it looked as if Noah Wyle and his production company were going to make a film of this book. Then, alas, the project fell through, in part I think because of the post 9/11 reluctance of Hollywood to produce movies about terrorists.

This is the first of my books with an author's note at the end, dealing primarily with robotics. Ironically, the day The Patient first hit the stores, The New York Times featured the report of a cardiac bypass operation done robotically (and successfully) via three pencil-sized holes placed in the patient's chest.

—Michael Palmer

Excerpt from The Patient book jacket:
Palmer's ninth medical thriller (after Miracle Cure) probably isn't the book to be reading when you've got a slight headache. Early on, a star Olympic gymnast feels a small pain in her skull, and soon she's having a brain tumor zapped by a flashy new surgical robot. The author, who was a full-time practitioner of internal and emergency medicine for 20 years, tells readers so much about the actual work of brain surgery that some might decide to skip over a few of the more agonizing moments, such as the frenzied operation on a young boy with a bullet wound. Yet these bloody and painful details put readers firmly inside the skin of Dr. Jessie Copeland, a neurosurgeon in her 40s with a combined undergraduate degree in biology and mechanical engineering. Now working under egomaniacal chief surgeon Carl Gilbride at a top Boston hospital, Jessie gets to try out ARTIE (Assisted Robotic Tissue Incision and Extraction) on cadavers, while Gilbride coaxes foundations to cough up millions for the revolutionary new procedure. Attracted by the media attention generated by ARTIE's use (too early, Jessie thinks) on the gymnast, shadowy terrorist Claude Malloche, known as "the Mist," who also has a brain tumor, comes to the hospital for treatment-and winds up holding patients and staff hostage in case the operation fails. It's finally up to Jessie and a rogue CIA agent to keep everyone healthy. This graft between medical and terrorist thriller has some rough edges, but the operation is a success.

read more about The Patient at:
RandomHouse.com/bantamdell

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BarnesandNoble.com
Amazon.com