A life-threatening illness became a life-changing event for a Calgary woman.
She gave up her successful law career to become a bestselling romance novelist.
Sarah’s Castille’s story is as fascinating as her works of fiction.
Castille, her husband, and two children were all living in London, England. She and her husband had extremely busy law careers, to the point where they didn’t see much of their kids, so they made the decision to move back to Canada.
They moved back to Canada in September 2009, and a month later life didn’t just slow down, it almost ground to a halt.
Castille was 38 weeks pregnant with her third child when became infected with H1N1, a flu virus.
She wound up in the hospital emergency department where the doctors told her what they had to do.
“’We're going to have to take the baby out’,” Castille recalled. “That's the last memory I had for two months.”
The baby was fine, but Castille was in a medically induced coma for two months, when she finally woke up, she had no idea she was no longer pregnant.
Her recovery took a year and during that time she read, among other things, romance novels.
When it came time to consider working again she remembered a conversation in the hospital. “So when I was lying there and someone said ‘was there anything in life you would have regretted’, and I said I would really have regretted never writing a book.”
Castille wrote her first novel, combining her legal knowledge with romance and the result was her first book, Legal Heat, an erotic romance novel.
“Every time I thought, oh maybe I'll go back to work, I'd get another contract or fan mail from somebody which was very uplifting.”
Castille tries to write every day, usually after her three children are in bed.
For now, she’s a full-time writer and law is on the backburner, but as she discovered, you never really know what’s going to happen next.
For more information: http://sarahcastille.com/
