David M. Ward Releases Excruciating, a Medical-Horror Debut Set at the Edge of Consciousness

The retired Army Reserve colonel and nurse anesthetist draws on two decades of clinical experience for a novel of grief, uncertainty, and fear in a hospital.

BUCKS COUNTY, PA, UNITED STATES, October 27, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — David M. Ward’s debut novel, Excruciating, is now available in e-book format following its October 25, 2026 release. Paperback and hardcover editions will be available through major bookstores and online platforms by October 30, 2026. Set in and around a small-town hospital, the medical-horror thriller follows a nurse anesthetist whose professional world begins to fracture amid personal loss and increasingly disturbing events. Ward brings more than two decades of operating-room and trauma-care experience to the setting, grounding the story in a world he knows while allowing its mystery to move beyond the boundaries of medicine.

A Place Built on Trust
Every day, patients enter operating rooms and place their lives in the hands of people they may have met only minutes earlier. They surrender consciousness with the expectation that someone will remain vigilant while they cannot protect themselves. Ward begins Excruciating at that threshold of trust. In a setting defined by observation, precision, and routine, the possibility that something has escaped notice becomes a source of unease.

At the center of the novel is Matthew Rix, a nurse anesthetist whose work requires him to maintain control at the moments others relinquish it. Outside the operating room, his life is less stable. He is grieving the loss of his son, his marriage and career are under strain, and his growing dependence on the drugs he administers threatens what remains of his sense of control. Then a murder close to him unsettles the hospital and draws him into circumstances he cannot readily explain.

As disturbing incidents accumulate, Matthew faces questions his training cannot answer. The novel’s tension grows from that uncertainty: a professional accustomed to interpreting symptoms and responding to emergencies encounters events that resist a clinical explanation. His grief and vulnerability deepen the stakes, but neither tells him whether the danger lies in the world around him, in his own judgment, or somewhere he has yet to look. Excruciating leaves the source of that danger for readers to discover.

Where Medical Knowledge Meets the Unknown
Ward’s professional background is integral to the novel’s premise. As a Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist, he spent more than two decades working in operating-room and trauma-care environments. That experience informs his understanding of the responsibility involved when a patient is placed under anesthesia, as well as the discipline required when circumstances change without warning. In Excruciating, recognizable clinical details provide the foundation for a story that becomes progressively harder to explain through medicine alone.

The novel also considers what happens when someone trained to protect others is no longer certain he can protect himself. Matthew’s personal losses and compromised judgment are not separate from the suspense; they shape how he experiences a hospital that once seemed familiar. The pressures of work, family, and grief remain visible even as another troubling possibility begins to emerge.

That contrast gives the setting its force. The hospital is not simply a backdrop for frightening events. It is a place where people depend on trust, where small decisions can have consequences, and where an unexplained occurrence is particularly difficult for a trained professional to dismiss. Ward uses that environment to pose an unsettling question: where do the limits of human judgment end, and where might something else begin?

A Debut Informed by a Life in Medicine and Service
Excruciating marks Ward’s fiction debut after a 37-year military career that began when he enlisted as a combat medic in 1988. He later served as an Air National Guard flight nurse and an Army Reserve nurse anesthetist, retiring as a colonel in late 2025. His military service and civilian clinical work placed him in demanding environments where preparation, responsibility, and uncertainty were part of everyday practice.

Those experiences do not make Excruciating an account of real patients or military events. Rather, they give Ward a professional perspective from which to write about vulnerability and the decisions people make under pressure. The novel brings that perspective to themes of grief, isolation, addiction, and the uneasy distance between what a person knows and what that person fears may be true.

Arriving in the days before Halloween, Excruciating brings together elements of medical suspense, psychological thriller, and supernatural horror. Its premise begins with a familiar act of trust: a patient closing their eyes and believing they will wake safely. From there, the story asks what happens when the place designed to protect the vulnerable no longer feels safe. The nature of the threat, and the answers Matthew finds, remain inside the novel.

Availability
The e-book edition of Excruciating was released on October 25, 2026, and is available for purchase on Amazon Kindle. Paperback and hardcover editions will be available through major bookstores and online platforms by October 30, 2026.

Purchase the e-book on Amazon Kindle

About David M. Ward
David M. Ward is a retired U.S. Army Reserve Colonel and Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist (CRNA) with over two decades of operating room and trauma care experience. He began his 37-year military career as an enlisted combat medic in 1988, later serving as an Air National Guard Flight Nurse and an Army Reserve nurse anesthetist before retiring in late 2025.

Having balanced intense leadership, clinical, and training roles through deployments spanning the First Gulf War, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Africa, Ward has witnessed firsthand the fragile boundaries of life and death. He draws heavily upon these raw, front-line medical and military experiences to write dark, character-driven supernatural thrillers that explore trauma, isolation, and the thin line between human suffering and redemption.

Excruciating is his debut novel. He resides in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

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