The Village Doctor

Maple Creek has a population of 803. It has one gas station, one diner, one elementary school, and one medical clinic — mine. The nearest hospital is forty-seven miles away. On a good day, with clear roads, it takes fifty minutes to get there. On a bad day — a snowstorm, a flood, a deer in the road — it can take two hours or more.

I have been the doctor in Maple Creek for twenty-three years. I have delivered babies in the back of pickup trucks. I have set broken bones on kitchen tables. I have diagnosed melanomas by sending photographs to a dermatologist in the city and hoping the cell signal held long enough for the images to transmit. I have pronounced deaths in living rooms because there was no time to get to the hospital and no point in trying. I have held the hands of widows and widowers and told them it was okay to cry, that I wasn't in a hurry, that I could stay as long as they needed.

There was a winter, about fifteen years into my time here, when I almost left. I was burning out — the isolation, the relentless call schedule, the feeling that I was practicing third-world medicine in the richest country on earth. I had an offer from a clinic in a city two hours away: regular hours, specialists to refer to, a salary three times what I was making. I had the contract on my desk, signed, ready to fax.

That morning, an older man I'll call Walter came in for his annual physical. He was eighty-two, a retired farmer, a man of very few words. I'd been his doctor for all fifteen years. He sat down on the exam table, looked at me, and said: "You know, doc, when my wife was dying, you came to the house every night for two weeks. You sat with us. You held her hand. You made her laugh. I don't think I ever told you what that meant."

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small, folded photograph — a picture of his wife, taken on their fiftieth anniversary. On the back, she had written: "Thank you, Dr. Brooks. You gave me two more years." I had caught her breast cancer early, during a routine exam, seventeen years earlier. She had gone to the city for treatment and come back. She had lived another twelve years — long enough to see her grandchildren born, to dance at her daughter's wedding, to sit on the porch with Walter on summer evenings.

I didn't fax the contract. I still have it, in a drawer in my desk, as a reminder of the day I almost left and the farmer who told me why I should stay.