Lucie Wilk's first novel is The Strength of Bone. She writes: "Once you start looking, there are quite a few of us out there, doctors who seek the quiet contemplations of creative writing—Vincent Lam, Liam Duncan, Daniel Kalla, Siddhartha Mukherjee, and Abraham Verghese come to mind. It sounds like too extreme a dichotomy, or at the very least, that there simply would not be enough time in the day, especially when you throw motherhood into the mix. But if I take a moment to think about it, I become aware that these three facets of my life have informed and improved one another, and despite the fatigue and the coffee habit, I wouldn’t have had it any other way."

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Medical care has become very regimented over the last couple of decades. The relatively recent practice of evidence-based medicine has forced a system of guidelines and protocols. There is less and less room for creativity in the provision of health care. 

It might be the writer in me, but I feel a void in this system. An individual patient is just that—an individual. Each patient comes with a unique story. But it is my job to smooth over the uniqueness of patients and find the similarities in their stories, to determine how they match each other in symptoms or signs. It is pattern recognition. This is why a more experienced doctor is usually a better doctor. They’ve seen more and are better able to recognize a pattern, even if one or two threads are different.

But in telling a story through writing… well, in writing, differences are elaborated, celebrated. Unique oddities are what shape an individual character, breathe life into them, make them real on the page. What is smoothed over and greyed out in medicine is brought forward into striking relief in writing. 

One of the benefits of celebrating the individual on the page and enjoying the mysteries of the creative process is that I can turn a more critical eye to the limitations of my day job. I find myself questioning the way things are done, including the scientific dogma underlying healthcare—the assumption that all illnesses can be boiled down to a mechanical flaw. Sometimes spending hours in a room conjuring stories produces an uncomfortable desire to question why things are done the way they are done. I think this ultimately improves the care I give my patients.

I am very fortunate in that my day job enables me to meet all sorts of people from all walks of life. I have made profound connections with people I’ve only recently met, a deep understanding passing between us in the space of a few minutes. I have shared in people’s most thrilling achievements, as they overcome adversity and in their moments of deepest loss and despair. I certainly don’t take these privileges for granted, and I know they inform my writing. That I’ve shared in a wide array of human experience inevitably spills out on the page.

Motherhood has also had a big impact on my writing, in a very different way. Before becoming a mom, I spent a lot of my life around the median of emotion, never straying too far from a safe zone. Once I became a mom, I was zoomed to the extremes of human feeling; the intensity could be overwhelming, but those moments of bliss were worth all the rest. My writing changed after this. I felt that I could understand more in each character. I could follow their emotional trajectories farther and deeper. Simply put, I knew how it felt.

Perhaps wearing each of these hats has honed one quality that is necessary to do all three jobs well: empathy. Occupying another person’s point of view, even if just in my head, can only benefit the person I’m trying to understand, whether they are my child, my patient, or my book character. I think what makes a good doctor often also makes a good mom and writer, so in many ways these careers are the perfect match, mirror images of each other but ultimately reflecting the same thing: the broadest reaches of human nature.

Lucie Wilk is a medical doctor and author. Her short fiction has been nominated for the McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize Anthology, long-listed for a CBC Canada Writes literary prize, and appeared in Descant, Prairie Fire, and Shortfire Press. She is an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia. She grew up in Toronto, completed her medical training in Vancouver, and now lives with her husband and two children in Devon, UK. The Strength of Bone is her first novel.