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Biography & Autobiography Personal Memoirs

Wake-Up Call

Tales from a Frontier Doctor

by (author) Sterling Haynes

Publisher
Caitlin Press
Initial publish date
Mar 2010
Category
Personal Memoirs
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9781894759441
    Publish Date
    Mar 2010
    List Price
    $19.95
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781894759724
    Publish Date
    Dec 2011
    List Price
    $9.99

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Description

In his second book, Wake-Up Call, Sterling Haynes begins by telling us that at the age of seventy a left hemisphere stroke rearranged his brain. “My right creative side took over and I started to write poetry and humour. I was left with a partially paralyzed right foot, but a writer’s creative right brain. I think I got the better of the deal, a new brain in trade for a foot. The funny episodes in my medical practice became hilarious. The sad, melancholy parts of my life’s memories looked less bleak.” Haynes shares the humorous and sometimes bizarre tales of his life as a doctor: a man shoots off his big toe in a drunken binge and then begs the doc to get him to Sunday Mass on time; an inmate swallows a spoon to avoid solitary confinement; an accident with a Murphy bed leaves a man hanging for more than ten hours.

 

"I worked long hours, made house calls, went out with the ambulance and flew to remote accident areas, sometimes receiving payment in kind: hinds of beef, lamb and moose, bags of potatoes and turnips and, on one occasion, a big game guide brought me a four-point buck in payment for delivering his first son, leaving the dressed carcass in the centre of my waiting room." Haynes tells it like it was in these tales of a frontier doctor, from Williams Lake to Alabama.

About the author

Raised in Alberta, Sterling Haynes received his medical degree from the University of Alberta. He served as a colonial officer in Nigeria and practised medicine in the Cariboo, Alberta and Alabama. Now retired, he lives in Westbank, BC, and travels extensively in Central America. His articles and poetry have been published in journals including The Canadian Journal of Rural Medicine and the Medical Post.

Sterling Haynes' profile page