The more I thought about it, especially after I met him, the agent, who was a pretty young guy, he was in his late 30s, I think, I met him and his wife, who was a literary attorney, and I, you know, I took a liking to them. I decided to write it and I thought, I can't write a book like this and practice surgery, because this book is going to have some very significant emotional context. You can't write about death and dying and families and the problems of what happens in hospitals as people are approaching death. You can't write about that sort of thing with any sensitivity at all and try to take care of sick people at the same time. So, I'm going to take a year off to write this book.

And Sarah agreed that was a good thing. So, I did that. I took a year off. July 1 to July 1, it was going to be, and I sat and began writing, and right away, it came, very quickly. I just took the pencil… I write with a pencil to this day, and with pads of paper. And I started writing. And I discovered a few things. On the very first day, I discovered that when you're a writer, you don't get lots of calls from nurses and sick people. The phone doesn't ring. You're all by yourself. You're sitting there with your pencil and your paper, and it's a kind of peace I had never known. It was just a great feeling to do that. And I remember I'd started writing about 8:00 in the morning and about 110:00 or 10:30, I… Sarah was home at that time. I walked into the kitchen and I said, 'You know, I like this life. This is a nice life. We ought to think about what we're going to do here'. And so, we would talk about it as the months went by, and about month number nine, we decided… because the book by this time was about three-quarters written, and I was very excited about it and I loved doing it. And also, I was getting requests to write an article for this magazine and, you know, this kind of thing. And so, at month number nine, we decided I was not going to go back to surgery, I was going to just… it was taking a bit of a chance, but I didn't think it was, because things were going so well.