Where the Road Ends
a novel
- Publisher
- Pottersfield Press
- Initial publish date
- Apr 2023
- Category
- General, Atlantic Provinces, Medical, General
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9781990770128
- Publish Date
- Apr 2023
- List Price
- $21.95
-
eBook
- ISBN
- 9781990770135
- Publish Date
- Mar 2023
- List Price
- $14.99
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Where to buy it
Description
Dr. Nathan Jericho loves medicine and the army, in that order. Surgery is his religion, his lifeblood. At least it was until his third tour in Afghanistan as a trauma surgeon with the Canadian Armed Forces. Untroubled sleep and confidence bordering on arrogance used to be easy. Now sleep is disrupted by nightmares and flashbacks fill his days. His patients and their tragic stories remain with him long after their discharges ... or deaths. Demons linger in his head and his hands begin to tremble. Retreat into a bottle and pills provides no more than momentary escape. He needs to get out of Afghanistan, the army, and perhaps even medicine. But he must finish his tour unnoticed. His unblemished service record had to be maintained. Self-sufficiency got him to this point in his life, he concludes, and he just needs to man up and do what has to be done. Can he hide his self-perceived weakness and survive the last few weeks of his tour?
Leaving everything he knows will not be easy. He must start slowly. He tries giving up the high stress of trauma surgery and resigning his commission to "normalize" his life and drive out the hellhounds that torment him. This tactic births a budding relationship along with an imperfect measure of comfort and contentment, until another tragedy takes him back. His attempt at a final escape is foiled by fate and the kindness of a friend. Forced to admit he has a problem, Jericho tries conventional methods of treatment which his own prejudices soon doom to failure. He attempts to escape his past on a hastily conceived motorcycle journey from Ontario to Newfoundland.
In Resurrection Cove he finds a bar, some friends, a love that he thought he had lost, and random acts of kindness. Will they be enough to overcome one last tragedy that threatens all that he wants and needs?
About the author
Larry Kramer graduated from Western University in London, Ontario, with a Doctor of Medicine degree and spent the next forty years as a family doctor, a hospitalist, and a locum physician. His collected experiences over that time formed the basis of his creative non-fiction quasi-memoir, An Imperfect Healer: The Gifts of a Medical Life, published by Pottersfield Press in 2019.
Over the years, Kramer has published widely in newspapers and magazines including The Globe and Mail, The Hamilton Spectator, The Medical Post, and The Canadian Medical Association Journal. Narrative medicine describing the patient-doctor interaction and how it affected not only the patient but the physician as well were often his focus. Along the way he garnered three Kenneth R. Wilson Awards in journalism for his work that appeared in The Medical Post. Always fond of the Anton Chekov quote that "Medicine is my lawful wife, but literature is my mistress," he returned to Western to study English Literature and Creative Writing. Where the Road Ends is his first venture into fiction. He recently moved from Brantford, Ontario, to Calgary, Alberta.