The Story Behind Death Wears Scrubs

An Author’s Note by Akin Akingbogun

A Longer Road

Death Wears Scrubs is my first full-length novel. Those who know my work know me for shorter journeys: short stories, novellas, and collections that move quickly from the first knock on the door to the final reckoning.

You will find that style in Dreams from Yesterday, Blood in the Water, Waste of Sin, Prisoner of Fate and Damaged Goods. Each is descriptive and steeped in narrative, and each carries the reader swiftly to its denouement.

This book asked for more of me. It runs two, even three times the length of anything I have written before. It needed room for characters to grow, for a plot to coil and uncoil, and for suspense to tighten slowly around the reader like a tourniquet.

The Corridors of 2026

The seed of this story was planted in 2026, in the days and nights I spent in hospital corridors. That year I came to know the hospital from more than one side of the bed.

I went through major surgery myself. Then my father, and later my wife, had to go under the knife too. Through it all I stayed close to their post-operative care, standing watch almost like a de facto senior nurse, a self-appointed matron.

I had good reason to be vigilant. Post-operative care is where too many Nigerian stories go wrong, and I was determined that ours would not become one of them. So I walked those corridors at every hour, watching, asking, and learning.

Stories in the Corridor

In those long hours I watched nurses and doctors carry out their work with real professionalism. I saw the quiet competence of a night shift, the hurried consultations at the nursing station, the small kindnesses offered between one emergency and the next.

For a creative mind, it was impossible not to begin weaving stories. I found myself imagining romances blooming between ward rounds, rivalries simmering behind closed doors, secrets that a hospital keeps better than any vault.

I also saw that the world outside never stops for the sick. Lagos keeps moving whether you are lying in a hospital bed or not. Traffic still crawls, bills still fall due, families still argue in the car park. The city presses against the hospital walls, and the hospital answers back.

And I saw how the deficiencies of our national systems shape the care a patient receives: power that fails at the wrong moment, supplies that run short, decisions bent by money or influence. These are not backdrops. They are forces that act on every character in this book.

Not an Exposé

This book is not an exposé, though some readers may choose to read it as one. My aim was never to indict a profession I came to respect deeply.

What I wanted was a setting unlike any I had used before. An Ikoyi hospital, with its gleaming lobby and its hidden back corridors, offered the perfect stage: a place where life and death are routine, where trust is absolute, and where a single person in scrubs holds enormous power over the vulnerable.

That is where the darkness of this story lives. Not in medicine itself, but in what can happen when that trust falls into the wrong hands.

The Medicine

A medical thriller lives or dies by its accuracy. So I did not rely on what I had seen alone. I sat down, again and again, with medical practitioners here in Nigeria who generously shared their knowledge.

Through those conversations I refined the terminology, the clinical procedures, the emergency protocols and the conditions described in these pages. The medical detail in this book is abundant, and it is deliberate.

My hope is that doctors will recognise their world in it, and that a young doctor might even learn something from an unusual source: not a fellow professional, but a writer who listened closely.

What You Now Hold

The result is the book in your hands: a story that blends medical language with literary craft. It has fully developed characters, a plot that twists when you least expect it, and suspense that builds chapter by chapter.

It was born in hospital corridors, shaped by long nights of watching and worrying, and sharpened by the wisdom of those who heal for a living. I hope it keeps you turning the pages late into the night, the way those corridors kept me awake.

Akin Akingbogun