Michael J. Collins

Like his father, grandfather and great-grandfather before him, Mike was born on the West Side of Chicago. He attended Fenwick High School and the University of Notre Dame where he was a less-than-stellar member of the hockey team. He worked his way through college shoveling furnaces at South Bend Foundry during the school year and driving a truck in the summers. Upon graduation, Mike spent several years trying to figure out things most guys his age had figured out years before. He worked as a truck driver, cab driver, construction laborer, dockworker and even did a little freelance journalism for the Irish Press in Dublin. \n A chance remark by one of his coworkers forced him to re-examine his life and eventually led him to seek admission to medical school. After graduation from the Loyola University Stritch School of Medicine, Mike headed north to the Mayo Clinic where he spent five years training in orthopedic surgery and moonlighting in rural emergency rooms to support his rapidly growing family. \n Upon completion of his residency Mike and his wife Patti (also born on the West Side) returned home to their ten brothers, three sisters, twenty aunts, nineteen uncles and one hundred cousins. They have lived in the same house for over thirty years, raising twelve wonderful kids, who may have aged them prematurely but whom they couldn’t love more or be prouder of. \n Mike's writing career began in 2005 with the publication of HOT LIGHTS, COLD STEEL (St. Martin's Press), a memoir of his days training at the Mayo Clinic. 2009 saw the publication of his second book, BLUE COLLAR, BLUE SCRUBS (also St. Martin's Press), a memoir of his days as a construction worker who dreamed of going to medical school. \n \n What does a doctor do when he discovers his best is not good enough? Mike's newest book, ALL BLEEDING STOPS, due out in 2020, tells the story of Matthew Barrett, idealistic young combat surgeon in the Vietnam War. From the battlefields of Vietnam to the streets of Chicago during the 1968 Democratic convention; from an organ donor company in Ohio where he “strips dead bodies for a living,” to a remote African village where he cares for victims of the Biafran War, ALL BLEEDING STOPS is a grand and sweeping narrative tracing one man’s journey to reconcile love for his patients with the cold reality that there are some problems no doctor, and no amount of caring, can ever fix.