Wake-Up Call

In his second book, 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 paralysed 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 goes on to share 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.