#Novel ‘Doctors and Friends’ predicted the COVID pandemic

The new novel “Doctors and Friends” (Berkley, out now) by former ER doctor Kimmery Martin focuses on a group of female friends from medical school. The pals are on a reunion trip to Spain when a strange, terrifying new virus begins rapidly spreading across the globe, upending daily life as they know it. No, not that virus. The introduction page to the book actually has a note to the reader: “The writing of this novel preceded COVID-19 and therefore there is no mention of the real-life pandemic. In this fictional universe, it does not exist.” We talked to Martin about the strange experience of having your fiction come to life. 

You wrote a novel about a pandemic, and then a pandemic happened.
It’s been very surreal. I’ve always had a fascination with infectious diseases, and I had to do a lot of research during a part of my career in ER medicine. I read a lot of nonfiction – books like “The Great Influenza” by John Barry and “Crisis in the Red Zone” by Richard Preston. It’s obvious in hindsight, but infectious disease doctors have been sounding the drum for a long time that a pandemic is going to come, and how prepared are we? When I wrote the book, I had  intended it as a cautionary tale. 

You’ve left the ER, but you’re still a doctor. When do you have time to write?
During the pandemic, I volunteered in vaccine clinics. I had a great job offer a few years ago. I live in Charlotte, NC. The business district had an allergy clinic, and they wanted an ER doctor onsite. I got this job where I could be in a room doing nothing. They warned me I would be bored, but I took the job. It gave me time to finish my novel and work normal hours for the first time in my life! This segued into me writing pretty much full time, but I have kept my [medical] focus up. 

I am struck by how much you predicted. Not just in terms of the virus, but in terms of small details about how the pandemic upends daily life. For doctors, was COVID-19 not that much of a reach to imagine?
If I had to put money on it, i would have bet on a respiratory virus, I would have guessed influenza. SARS and MERS were wakeup calls. When I originally started writing this book, I had the virus [in the book] as a form of super flu, like 1918. But then I decided to make up a virus, so I crowdsourced a bunch of total nerds at the CDC. There are big online groups of female doctors, and for the purposes of fiction, my virus had to be completely terrifying without everyone dying. With COVID-19, what was a big surprise [for the medical community] was how weird it turned out to be — all these different body parts affected in different ways.