Fazlur Rahman

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Published by: Texas Tech University Press
Release Date: October 29, 2024
Pages: 256
ISBN13: 9781682832233

 
OVERVIEW

Fazlur Rahman's mother died tragically when he was only seven years old, but her words reverberated throughout his life: "Someday you will be a doctor, Fazlur, and save lives." Eventually, he fled his war-torn homeland and, after years of training in New York and Houston, became a cancer doctor. He could never have imagined that his medical career would unfold in remote West Texas and that he would be a pioneer oncologist for a vast region.

Over a 35-year career, Rahman poured himself into not just taking care of his patients' challenging medical needs but learning from them, getting to know their lives, their families, and the circumstances that made each patient unique.

He narrates the instructive stories of five cancer patients: surviving against all odds; walking a long path with cancer and still making a daily life; bearing the crushing burdens of the exorbitant costs of cancer drugs, sometimes dictating a decision either to save your own life or to leave enough for your family to live on; navigating the vagaries of old age and coping with malignancy; and patients' desire for dignity, dignity that we all want, rich or poor.

These compassionate tales are a blend of 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.

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PRAISE & REVIEWS

“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 the members of the medical profession.”
—Hagop M. Kantarjian, MD, Professor of Medicine and Chair, Department of Leukemia, MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, Texas

 

“Fazlur Rahman is a wonderful story-teller. I was immediately drawn in by the vivid characters, touched by their plights, and by the author’s depth of compassion.”
—Jonathan Balcombe, bestselling author of What a Fish Knows, and Super Fly

 

“The renowned clinician, Dr. William Osler, considered the “Father of Internal Medicine”, observed: “The good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient who has the disease.”

Fazlur Rahman is not only a great physician; this remarkable man is also a wonderful writer.

From his humble beginnings in what is now Bangladesh (and for this story I highly recommend his cultural memoir, The Temple Road), and throughout his post-graduate training in internal medicine and oncology in New York and Houston, it took amazing fortitude and faith for Dr. Rahman to find his way to San Angelo, Texas. There he garnered the love and respect of its citizens through his delivery of high quality primary and specialty care over many decades.

How he accomplished this is the main thrust of this memoir. Every turn this writer takes—into medical science, the evolution of oncological treatments, the intricacies of doctor-patient-family relationships—serves to enlighten and enhance this story. This physician’s dedicated attentiveness to the daily, then yearly, then career-long practice of patient-centered “connected” medicine is rare in America’s fractured health system today, and we are all the poorer for it.

With this book, Dr. Rahman joins the ranks of other great physician writers: Anton Chekhov, William Carlos Williams, Richard Selzer, Oliver Sacks and Abraham Verghese among others. You will not be able to put this book down. And when 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

 

“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 Dr. Rahman’s 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

 

“The story of each of these five unforgettable women and men makes a powerful reading. These are mesmerizing and 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, he 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