Finding Stories

Finding Stories

Stories don’t come out of nowhere. Even when a writer doesn’t realize it, inspiration comes from real life.

I’m often asked where I got the idea for VIRAL. The book is about a pandemic, but it was written in the year before COVID raised its ugly head. Readers joke that I had some kind of insight into the future, and I should be careful what I write about from now on.

But VIRAL didn’t come from the future, it came from the past. When I was a student in veterinary college, I was expected to find summer employment that had something to do with vet work. For the first years of school, I found a job fishing in the farthest northern reaches of Quebec. The work had nothing to do with vet medicine, but it was a great adventure, and I even learned a bit of Inuktitut.

Further into my veterinary education, it became clear that I needed to find some work that had more to do with my chosen occupation. By my third year in school, I was married, and my wife was attending medical school at the opposite end of Ontario. She was studying year-round in Ottawa and my main – no, my only – criterion for a summer job was to be in the same place as my wife.

I searched for work in a vet clinic in Ottawa but had no luck. Eventually, I found a job working in a lab animal facility in the city. I had no intention of ever working with lab animals after graduation, but it was a chance to be around real veterinary work.

The building I worked in was a high-level biosecure facility. We had to shower in and out every day and if we worked in the level 4 labs on the third floor we had to shower again and change clothes.

I enjoyed my work there and got to work with miniature pigs, rabbits, chickens, and monkeys. The animals were well cared for by the people working in the building and the research resulted in important improvements for human health.

The strangest part of the job was working with the monkeys. Green monkeys are a small breed that are curious and intelligent. I spent hours just watching these fascinating creatures and I always felt they found me just as interesting. At times I wondered if the scientific gains made in the building were worth holding these wonderful animals in captivity and subjecting them to the work done there. The value of animal research is a complicated question. I understand its value, but I could never do this for a job.

The other reality of the monkeys that was important was how dangerous they were. Diseases people get from other animals are called zoonoses. The closer related two species of animals are, the more risk of serious diseases being passed between them. Monkeys are just about the most deadly animals to be around as far as risk of disease.

My boss was a lab animal veterinarian and his predecessor had been bitten by one of the monkeys and died of simian herpes B.

Everyone working in the building knew the story and we were all aware of the potential danger from the monkeys we worked with. If they bit us, we could get sick or even die and if they were carrying a serious disease and got out of the building, they could start something bad.

That’s were VIRAL came from. The book begins with an incident where a monkey gets out of its cage and starts up a pandemic. The story of the animal’s escape and capture are all real. The rest comes from other places and pure imagination. But the events the happened to me in that lab animal building became the inspiration for a book many years later.