While reading Grace H. Kaiser’s Dr. Frau: A Woman Doctor Among the Amish (reviewed briefly here), I learned that she had written a second book titled Detour, about suffering an accident which left her disabled.

Grace was an active family practice physician in a primarily Amish area when a freak accident resulting from getting her foot tangled in an electric cord left her a quadriplegic. Her doctor told her she should be able to return to her practice within a year, so she pushed herself hard to achieve that goal only to find it was not a reality. He had only told her that to motivate her to work hard, feeling she would be depressed and discouraged if she knew the truth from the outset. Thus the discouragement and depression hit about a year later when reality sank in.

Throughout the book there are glimpses into incidents that occurred during her practice, her former patients coming to visit her, her husband’s perspective during both her active practice and her injury, her life and adjustments, spinal cord injury, her point of view as a doctor-turned-patient, and her struggle to find something useful and meaningful to do in the state she found herself after a year of intensive therapy.

I continued to enjoy her apt, concise but colorful sentences that she employed here as well as in her first book: “empty as Monday morning church, ” “I feel like dice shaking in a cup,” “That applejack wore fingers of golden satin as it slid across my tongue.”

The book is not a Christan book per se, though it is not an anti-Christian book: the doctor has some kind of belief in God but does not really write from that perspective. I only mention that because I review many Christian books and don’t want readers to mistakenly think they’ll find issues of faith dealt with in connection with the other subjects.

It is a good, fascinating and honest book, and I enjoyed reading it.

(This review will be linked to Semicolon‘s Saturday Review of Books).