Crossings

As a child living on an Indian reservation, Jon Kerstetter knew the meaning of boundaries. Driven by a desire to break free of society’s expectations, he pushed to graduate from college and earn advance degrees in business and, at the age of thirty-seven, medicine. Those were just the first among the many improbable and dramatic transitions Kerstetter has made in his life. In Crossings: A Doctor-Soldier’s Story, he writes beautifully and thoughtfully about his exceptional life of transformations. Kerstetter goes from civilian to doctor to soldier, trained to heal yet trained to kill, and then to stroke victim, and, eventually, to writer.

At the peak of his military and medical career, Kerstetter had a stroke; within hours, his life as a soldier and physician was over. Left with serious cognitive and physical disabilities compounded by PTSD and excruciating pain, he began his painstaking, years-long recovery efforts. At a loss to come up with vocational rehab appropriate for Kerstetter’s background, his neuropsychologist suggested he try an experimental therapy: writing about his medical and war experiences as a way to help him order his thinking, reform vital brain connections, and, ultimately, heal.