Illness, Healing, and Hope
No matter where you live, life doesn’t take a break while you are at the clinic. My patients not only had to fight cancer but also cope with their everyday living. They helped me understand a universal need in medical practice: empathy.
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About Fazlur
Fazlur Rahman was born and brought up in what is now Bangladesh. After his medical education in Dhaka, New York, and Houston, he practiced cancer medicine for thirty-five years in San Angelo, Texas. He is an adjunct professor of biology (medical humanities and ethics) at Angelo State University, a senior trustee of Austin College in Sherman, Texas, and an advisory council member of the Charles E. Cheever Jr. Center for Medical Humanities and Ethics at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio. His writings on medical, ethical, social, and scientific issues have appeared in many national and international publications.
About Our Connected Lives
Compassionate tales that blend storytelling, cancer science, and Rahman’s personal reflections and struggles on making medical decisions that treat a patient as a whole person, not just as a person with a disease.
Praise
“With this book, Dr. Rahman joins the ranks of other great physician writers . . . [W]hen the last page is turned, you may wonder where you might find someone like this author to care for you. I know I did.”
—Jerald Winakur, MD, MACP, FRCP
Author of Memory Lessons: A Doctor's Story and Human Voices Wake Us
read the full review
“Fazlur Rahman is a wonderful storyteller. I was immediately drawn in by the vivid characters and touched by their plights and by the author’s depth of compassion.”
—Jonathan Balcombe, bestselling author of What a Fish Knows and Super Fly
“Cancer touches countless lives worldwide. As a cancer researcher, I applaud Dr. Rahman's effort to make cancer biology accessible to everyone in Our Connected Lives. As a physician, I appreciate how his thoughtful stories illuminate the practice of cancer medicine—not just by revealing the struggles patients and doctors face, but also by highlighting the importance of treating patients as people rather than cases. The lessons in this book are instructive for us all: cancer patients and their loved ones, general readers as well as members of the medical profession.”
—Hagop M. Kantarjian, MD, Professor of Medicine and Chair, Department of Leukemia
MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, Texas
“The stories of each of these five unforgettable women and men make for powerful reading. These are mesmerizing page-turner tales, making us genuinely concerned about the lives of those individuals with cancer. But their stories are also relevant to other people, whether they have cancer or not.”
—Kanti Rai, MD, Winner of the ASH Wallace H. Coulter Award for Lifetime Achievement in Hematology
“Dr. Rahman takes us on a journey of resilience, love, and empathy. He has the ability to see light when many of us would see only darkness while caring for patients with cancer. This book shows us that not only are we all connected but also we walk together on the path of our lives. Moreover, Dr. Rahman teaches us that empathy and hope are the most powerful tools we have to help our patients when they are most vulnerable, and that showing dignity to our patients is an integral part of care. This is a must-read!”
—Alfredo Quiñones-Hinojosa, MD, William J. and Charles H. Mayo Professor, Monica Flynn Jacoby Endowed Chair, James C. and Sarah K. Kennedy Dean of Research, Mayo Clinic; author of Becoming Dr. Q: My Journey from Migrant Farm Worker to Brain Surgeon
“Dr. Fazlur Rahman’s Our Connected Lives: Caring for Cancer Patients in Rural Texas is a must-read, flush with all the richness of human life in the face of illness. In these pages, the cancer doctor walks alongside his patients through the difficult conversations, complex medical decisions, losses, and triumphs that cancer brings. Dr. Rahman’s intense empathy for his West Texas patients vivifies these pages and drives him to provide excellent, diligent, humane care. Any reader who wants to know what cancer is like from the other side—the doctor’s side—will be enlightened to find in these stories a testimony to how deeply doctors care for our patients and indeed how connected we all are, in the end. If you have doubted whether doctors actually care not only for patients but about them as human beings, this book will change you. It shows how the best doctors among us are, and how we all ought to be.”
—Rachel Pearson, MD, PhD, Humanities Director, Charles E. Cheever, Jr. Center for Medical Humanities and Ethics; Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long Distinguished Professor in Bioethics; author, No Apparent Distress: A Doctor’s Coming of Age on the Front Lines of American Medicine
Featured Articles
From Chauvinism and Death to Ever-Increasing Hope on Breast Cancer, Newsweek
October is breast cancer awareness month worldwide, a time for reflection on its past, present and future.
A Caring Heart for the Mentally Ill, San Angelo Standard-Times and USA TODAY
When I was a medical student and in training in the 1960s and '70s, cancer and mental illness were discussed in hushed voices, for both had stigmas.
Nurturing Empathy: An Oncologist Looks at Medicine and Himself, The Oncologist
Empathy in medicine matters. I should know—I have been a practicing oncologist for 35 years—but it was only when, in a matter of seconds, I went from doctor to patient that I grasped its true significance.
Lonesome George, R.I.P., New York Times
In a world beset with intractable economic and political problems, why should the death of a tortoise matter? Because his death alerts us to our blindness to the natural world, and because he was known as the rarest creature on earth, the last of his subspecies, and we will never see his kind again.
Also by Fazlur
The Temple Road: A Doctor's Journey
The Temple Road: A Doctor’s Journey is an inspiring story of love, joy, suffering, medicine, and achievement. The book takes readers from the jungles of Bangladesh to Dr. Rahman’s training at leading medical centers in New York and Houston, and details the overwhelming emotions that come with his work as one of the most talented oncologists in the US.
