Firefax's release and a word on gratitude

Dear Reader,

This past week Firefax, my debut novel, went out into the world. I have received some very kind reviews, though obviously the book is not for everyone.

Sending Firefax out into the world was a surprisingly emotional experience for me. I doubt I will ever release another book that is quite as deeply personal as this one.

Why is this action-adventure story about assassins and spies and the darkness of humanity in isolation so deeply personal?

To answer that, we have to look at what prompted the writing in the first place. We must go back to the beginning of the Delta wave of COVID-19 in late 2021.

I had transitioned out of the emergency department to working inpatient medicine, and found myself immersed in the dead and the dying. The emergency department was a place that wore its COVID-19 exposure like a badge of honor, but few people died of COVID-19 there. They came to the hospital floors and lingered, and suffered, gasping for air, and finally succumbed to the virus, and I cared for them until the end, along with a host of over-worked, incredible, and now forgotten healthcare providers. Many of whom, I suspect are still haunted when they pass by the hospital rooms once occupied by those they strove so hard to save. 

For me writing often comes from a place of darkness. When the world is hideous and unbearable, writing is my refuge.

So I wrote. From my dresser drawer I took a book whose first draft I had written originally in similar dark times, many years before, in high school. I dusted the pages off, and I rewrote that book between shifts on those nights of hell.

My nights in the hospital were filled with the sobs of family members through the phone when I woke them to say that, despite everything we had done, their family member was actively dying. There were always two options: we could escalate things and send their loved one to the ICU, so that they could endure a more prolonged and torturous death, or we could change course, let them stop fighting, and keep them comfortable in their final hours or days. More often hours than days by the time we were having this conversation. Sometimes only minutes.

With my nights embalmed in this horror, I rewrote that book during the day, pouring my soul into those pages, finding an escape from the real-life darkness in the make-believe darkness of my characters.

It was not that I had not known tragedy before, I had, many times. As an EMT and then a paramedic for ten years I had worked in some of the most poverty-stricken places in the US, as well as Guatemala, and Mexico. I had struggled to save men, women, and children injured or ill by the most heinous mechanisms. But this darkness was different. This was a more helpless feeling than in all those other horrors I had witnessed.

The world was coming alive outside the hospital during that COVID-19 wave, tired of being shut in. People were insistent on going back to sports events and concerts, reopening the clubs, getting back to their friends, and parties, without a thought to the thousands that were still dying every day in hospitals around the country. It was a loneliness that felt like madness. As if what I was seeing was not even happening.

Here I was, wandering within the dying halls, while out there the world ignored the toll exacted by their merriment. COVID-19 was already over for those not embroiled in it. On the radio, on my way to work, I listened to men and women of every political persuasion whining about the hardship of their long pandemic confinements, and rejoicing as they were set free at last to wreak havoc and mortality upon the vulnerable.  

In the midst of such darkness, writing was my saving grace, along with gratitude. During the Delta wave, I chose to be grateful that I had that brief chance to know and care for so many people in the last days of their lives. I am still deeply, immensly grateful that I had the opportunity to meet them before they passed, and to care for their families in their passing. I looked upon my patients in those final moments and saw that they were people, that they existed, and that they mattered.

Every single one of them mattered, and their lives and their deaths mattered. They mattered because they were human, and they had lived, and it was beautiful, and I, though I didn’t deserve it, had been given that chance to meet them, in all their humanity—their beautiful, wonderful, flawed humanity. 

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the years working in the hospital, it’s that my writing matters to me, but no one lives or dies if it isn’t published. I’ve learned not to take my writing seriously, in a good way. I’ve learned that this is a delightful hobby, that produces work that some people will enjoy, and some won’t, like any art. But no one lives or dies because this book was or wasn’t published.

It’s at my job where people’s lives are at stake, and my writing will never matter as much as those lives and the families of my patients. My book will never matter as much as all the ghosts that haunt me now as I walk the halls of the hospital and see the maskless faces of nescient people peering from those same rooms where I bore witness to so many deaths.

And now I find myself grateful once again. I am inexpressibly grateful to all the lovely people taking the time to read and reflect on this book, a tale of adventure and intrigue, danger and evil, but also of love and redemption and family, that sprang from such a place of personal anguish.

Thank you, dear reader, so much, for taking the time to read this work.

In solidarity,

A.M. Vergara