A Measure of My Days: The Journal of a Country Doctor - Softcover

Loxterkamp, David, M.D.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0874518857 ISBN 13: 9780874518856

Publisher: Univ Pr of New England, 1997

Synopsis

This is the story of one year in the life of a family physician in Belfast, Maine, and his connections not just to that community but to the Human family. In thoughtful, elegiac, often lyrical prose, David Loxterkamp muses about his patients, his colleagues, his family, and his relationship to his Maker as he recalls the daily minutiae that constitute "the bookmarks in a bountiful life, a string of facts and circumstances that have moved beyond the mere documentary" to his discovery of "peace and perspective and companionship along my muddled way."

That way, which is faithfully mapped by journal entries, is populated by the characters he has come to know: the lobstermen, millworkers, church-goers, back-to-the-landers, and "those from away" who share this picturesque, bare-bones, blue-collar piece of Maine coast. We meet Elena, whose fatal Lou Gehrig's disease reduces her speech to air made into letters on a computer screen. Bernitha languishes in a slow death from lung cancer. A laboring mother deals with her pain, uncertainty, and the realized possibility of a deformed infant. Through the dull and the dramatic, the mundane and the magnificent, Loxterkamp finds his way and fashions "an anthem to the Good God" with deeply moving, "everyday stories of an irrepressible human spirit, a spirit refined by adversity and renewed by love."

About this title

Review:

David Loxterkamp is a family practitioner in Belfast, Maine, and The Measure of My Days is an account of one year in his life and those he serves. It soon becomes clear in Loxterkamp's chronicle that one need not look to big city emergency rooms for medical drama: among his patients, the doctor includes one woman suffering from the debilitating and ultimately fatal Lou Gehrig's disease and another dying slowly from lung cancer. The dramatic, the tragic, and the transcendent moments of medicine are interspersed in Loxterkamp's journal with more mundane matters--breakfast with his family, Easter Sunday services at church, shopping at the supermarket--that complete the picture of a small-town doctor's life.

In the pages of Loxterkamp's journal, the reader meets mill workers and lobster fishermen, churchgoers and backsliders, young and old, the just-born and the soon-to-die. The author's relationships with his friends, neighbors, and patients, as well as the greater issues that arise from those relationships, form the backbone of this thoughtful, year-in-the-life memoir.

From the Publisher:

6 1/8 x 9 1/4 trim. LC 96-54704

About this edition

• Publisher: Univ Pr of New England
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0874518857
• ISBN 13: 9780874518856
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 333