Sault Ste. Marie doctor writes novels about pandemic — during pandemic

During the COVID-19 shutdown last spring, with the country on lockdown, the chief of orthopaedic surgery at the Sault Area Hospital had a lot of extra time on his hands.

"I had five weeks on my hands, twiddling my fingers," Dr. Graham Elder told Markus Schwabe on CBC Radio's Morning North.

 "I got this idea about a book: writing something about the pandemic during the pandemic."

 After six weeks Elder had a first draft.  

By June his first book, A Covid Odyssey, was self-published.

It tells the story of a physician from a small town in northern Ontario wanting to rescue his wife, who gets sick while at a conference in Florida.

Elder has since written a sequel, "Second Wave," set during the the second wave of the pandemic in November, where the protagonist must try to acquire a possible cure for COVID from his dying father in England.

"A big part of this book is education," said Elder, who wanted to underscore the importance of physical distancing and mask-wearing through the telling of the stories.

Elder plans on writing a third novel, to complete the trilogy, but is waiting for the actual story of the COVID-19 pandemic to evolve.

"The writing has allowed me to mentally escape from what's been going on in the world," he said. 

When asked if it may be too soon for people to read stories set during a pandemic, Elder admits they may not be for everyone.

"I'm hoping, somewhere down the road when things return to more normal, people might be able to look back on these books and say, 'OK, here's where we were at that time.'"