Cassie Alexander: Book 3 in the Edie Spence series

Shapeshifted is the third book in my Edie Spence series, about Edie, a nurse who works with paranormal creatures. I'm a nurse in real life, so most of the medical stuff is as accurate as it can get, when there's zombies and werewolves and vampires involved. ;) I'm also a bit of a medical history buff.

I still get stuff wrong, but I reread Dracula recently, and talk about medical errors, holy cow -- I didn't realize until my reread that they transfuse Lucy with blood three times, from three different men, when they're wrestling her back and forth with Dracula each night.

My 2000's medical eye was all, "OH NO THEY DIDN'T."

Dracula was written just before doctors and scientists became aware of blood types, but just after when technology had gotten good enough to make blood transfusions possible. Unless Lucy were magically AB-, chances are she would have had transfusion reactions at least once, and possibly all of the times they gave her blood, which probably would have been enough to kill her, minus Dracula visiting every chance he got.

But they were doing all they could to save her, and that was high tech at the time -- I can totally understand Stoker wanting to write that in there, because when blood transfusions did work, I'm sure they seemed like magic. I mean he was only a century out from people trying to transfuse the blood of a lamb into a mentally ill people on the theory that it would help 'calm' them down.

I do spend a little bit of time each book wondering what I'm getting wrong, things that people in the next 20-40 years will find dated. I just hope any mistakes people fine will be because medical care has become so awesome by then that they won't remember how rough it used to be back in 2013.

Cassie Alexander