The thought of writing about my experience as a doctor had been percolating for a couple of years before I started my blog and published my first post on April 28, 2008. I remember having a black notebook during our traditional New Year’s visit to Château Frontenac in Quebec. I was all dressed up in my tuxedo, waiting for the New Year’s dinner to begin and I finally hatched the title, A Country Doctor Writes. I didn’t know then if it was going to be a book or a blog or something else.
I didn’t get much more written in my little black book during that New Year’s holiday, and it took me almost a year and a half before I finally did it. I had some professional challenges that, in a way, made me think of my writing idea as a means to focus on the good and important aspects of being a doctor instead of some of the daily difficulties I had to navigate.
By November that year, I made the difficult decision to leave the practice where I had spent the bulk of my career up until that point. We ended up moving almost 200 miles north and I started over as a complete unknown at age 56. Talk of fodder for writing about being a doctor.
Up north, I quickly grew my practice and earned the trust of both patients and the medical community. Then, six years later, a new administrator in my old practice convinced me to return to my old position as medical director. But a divorce forced me to choose between going back to the job up north and the farm in Caribou, which was sitting there, empty and ready for horses, or to figure out how to start over “downstate” as we call the middle and southern parts of Maine.
Having worked in both parts of Maine as well as in Sweden, I have gathered more experiences than if I had stayed in one place. And it has made fictionalizing my clinical vignettes especially easy, beyond changing the names, ages and maybe even sexes in my case descriptions. Nobody knows where each particular patient was located. And now, so many years down the road, I don’t even remember for sure what the names were in all of the stories, which I have gathered since I graduated from medical school in 1979.
This summer, I will have been a doctor for 46 incredible years!