By Elizabeth Foxwell
Illustration by Malcolm Garris/PhotoDisc
November 30, 1998

"I have learned my greatest lessons in life while wearing scrubs," declares mystery author and former trauma nurse Eileen Dreyer, RN. Learning those lessons has taken Dreyer through a nearly 20-year career as a trauma nurse at St. John’s Mercy Medical Center and St. Anthony’s Medical Center in St. Louis to a medico-legal death investigation course at St. Louis University and finally to her full-time career writing about the heartbreaks and rewards of the nursing community she came to know so well.

In her mysteries, Dreyer captures dilemmas in the healthcare professions such as the battle between health care and big business in Nothing Personal and A Man To Die For, and the demands of caring for Alzheimer’s and other geriatric patients in her latest, Brain Dead.

"The nurse’s perspective is the most real perspective of health care," Dreyer said. "If you think [physician mystery writer] Robin Cook really knows how a hospital runs, I dare him to order something up from central supply and get it in the same day. The frustrations, mischances, and petty politics of the hospitals are very real." But in writing, she said, "the justice is mine."

Real lives

Dreyer also writes about the lives of her fictional nurses, from Brain Dead’s Timmie Leary-Parker, who must care for an aged parent while dealing with work pressures, divorce, and single parenthood, to A Man To Die For’s Casey McDonough, who copes with a religious fanatic mother and alone suspects a revered gynecologist of murder. Dreyer knows the often overwhelming pressures of nursing, having left trauma nursing with a case of burnout. So as a poignant counterpoint to the life-and-death issues in the novels, many of her women characters confront the beginnings of new relationships. (Dreyer also writes romance novels under the pseudonym Kathleen Korbel.)

"So much that happens in medicine is the distillation of our greatest fears, anxieties, prejudices, and hopes," Dreyer said. "So much that happens on an ED hallway at 3 a.m. is deeply and shatteringly felt. So much is held in because it simply wouldn’t do anybody any good at that moment." In Brain Dead, society’s lost focus on the quality of life is examined. "I wanted to touch that place in myself that every nurse has experienced, slogging through trying to save the unsaveable, and I wanted to share it with people who hadn’t been forced into that position."

Beyond the usual

In addition, Brain Dead highlights an aspect of the nursing profession outside the mainstream: forensic nursing. Forensic nurses are trained in such areas as death investigation and protection of evidence in rape cases or other violence without risking the health of the traumatized patient. Their training equips them to interact with the police. Dreyer, who says that "forensic nurses possess more skills than a fictitious sleuth would use to solve a crime," is a member of the International Association of Forensic Nurses.

"Medicine itself is a detecting process," she said. "Within the patient is some disruption we must set right. To do so, we must take a set of clues, a variety of possible scenarios, and the old gut instinct to solve the puzzle and set things right. By inclination and training, we’re some of the best detectives."

The best medicine

Despite the often hard realities found in her books, Dreyer finds a place for humor. In Nothing Personal, the elite club of "Pig Nurses" meets decorously attired in starched nurses caps and snouts. When a serial killer stalks the staff at a facility nicknamed "St. Serious Money," a note appears on the bulletin board in the coronary care unit. It reads: "Dear serial killer, for your consideration," followed by a list of administrators, chiefs of service, and "mindless paper pushers who interfere with every nursing decision" ranked on a scale from one to 10. And Dreyer chose the title of her latest book so that "I could appear in the paper as ‘Brain Dead author Eileen Dreyer.’ "

Dreyer’s next book will focus on the first female medic on a SWAT team in St. Louis. She also has finished Head Games, a follow-up to Bad Medicine, where trauma nurse and death investigator Molly Burke makes a repeat appearance. She has no plans to take on a sleuth with a different profession; Dreyer finds plenty of writing fodder and lessons in nursing.

"The best friends I had were my fellow hospital staff—not just the nurses, but all of the staff," Dreyer said. "Every person on the hall was human, with strengths and weaknesses and great heroism camouflaged in humor and pragmatism. They are the finest people I’ve known."

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The 1998 Career Guide

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Alternative Therapy
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