Description:
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.
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