One Morning in Maine (that’s a famous children’s book, at least locally), I set off to my new office in Presque Isle. There is a fairly dense fog as I leave the house at 7:30. I usually don’t have to leave this early, but on this day I am scheduled for a mask fitting, with COVID still a close reality.
I didn’t want to go through Caribou in the morning traffic on Route 1 to Presque Isle with lots of stops for red lights, so I am following the Grimes Road along the northern shore of the Aroostook river to Fort Fairfield. As the fog slowly lifts, I see more and more of the river and the foliage. I pass Rocking S Ranch, where there are groups of boarded horses eating round bale hay in the nearly barren fields. My own horses probably wouldn’t eat round bale; I left them munching on second cut hay, an almost rare delicacy here in northern Maine.
Going from Fort Fairfield toward Presque Isle, I don’t turn right on my usual weekend shopping road that would bring me past Lowe’s to a fairly busy part of town, but continue past Amish country with more horses in the fields and some shackled to buggies standing outside the farm houses. In Easton I turn right and eventually pass the small hospital in Presque Isle and then turn onto a side street before I even see the very first traffic light on my journey and I actually arrive at the office in less time than if I had taken the busiest road through town.
My first house call for the day is an hour away, close to Houlton. I see Edwin Starks, a man with multiple medical problems and spotty medical care. Halfway through our one hour initial visit I know that he had been misdiagnosed and that he suffers from an iatrogenic condition (an avoidable disease caused by his previous providers’ misguided medication choices).