Dr. Sanjay Gupta is CNN's chief medical correspondent, a neurosurgeon, an assistant professor at Emory University School of Medicine, and a father. As though that weren't impressive enough, he recently added a new title to his resume: novelist.
Gupta has just finished his first book of fiction called "Monday Mornings," which follows five doctors at a fictional hospital called Chelsea General. The novel chronicles not just the personal and professional lives of the surgeons and the patients they meet along their way, it also looks at how doctors cope with their mistakes.
The novel's title refers to the "Morbidity and Mortality," or "M&M" meetings that are held every Monday at Chelsea General where surgeons gather to discuss what went wrong in recent surgeries. Such meetings happen regularly at hospitals, Gupta says, and he wanted to show outsiders what they're like.
"It's a look at a part of hospitals and a port of medicine that I think very few people know exists and even fewer have seen, and that revolves around this idea that there's a secret gathering that takes place in hospitals where doctors openly discuss their mistakes," Gupta told CTV's Canada AM Thursday.
"This is real. This actually happens in many hospitals and I've been part of these meetings."
While many Canadians know Gupta from TV, he is actually still a busy practising surgeon. The 42-year-old is the associate chief of neurosurgery at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta and performs more than 200 surgeries a year.
During his 20-year-long surgery career, Gupta says he has kept detailed notes at his own "M&M" meetings. After a while, he realized there were some unbelievable stories in those notes that deserved telling.
"They've been some of the most indelible experiences of my life," Gupta says.
He decided to fictionalize the stories into a novel that would give a glimpse into hospital life and also pull back the curtain on how doctors cope with their own and their colleagues' mistakes.
Gupta says these meetings can be emotionally charged forums.
"If a mistake happens, the worst crime of all would be that no one learns from it and the mistake just keeps repeating itself," says Gupta. "So these meetings are designed to try to prevent that. But they can also be very raw, very candid with a war-zone like atmosphere at times."
While the characters is Gupta's book aren't based on anyone in particular, Gupta says they were cobbled together from dozens of people he's met in his career.
"Some of them are based on real people, some of them are based on people I only observed for a time but never interacted with, and some are fictional characters that I've taken from other books and sort of merged them with mine," he says.
Gupta concedes that it wasn't easy finding the time to write the novel. Along with this medical duties and his job with CNN, he's also a father of three daughters under the age of seven. Oh, and he puts in a few hours a week training for a triathlon.
He says he actually found the time to write while he was reporting for CNN from medical emergency hot spots such as Haiti, Japan and Iraq.
"I'm not a super fast writer; this book took a long time," he says. "…I would write it in fits and bursts, a lot of it on planes travelling to these places. I wrote once for 30 hours straight because it was all there in my head," he says.
The novel has been so well received, work has already begun on turning it into a TV series. Executive producer David E. Kelley, who produced "Boston Legal" and "Chicago Hope," among others, is working on a pilot based on Gupta's novel, to be called "Chelsea Hospital." Alfred Molina and Ving Rhames have already been cast to star.
