Our Connected Lives - by Fazlur Rahman

About the Book

The pioneering oncologist in West Texas reflects on a life of service to his patients.

Book Synopsis

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 and 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 negotiating the steps of every day; bearing the crushing burdens of the exorbitant costs of cancer drugs, sometimes dictating a decision either to save one's own life or leaving enough for the family to live on; navigating the vagaries of old age and coping with malignancy; and patients' desire for dignity, a self-respect that we all want, rich or poor.

These compassionate tales are a blend of storytelling, cancer science, and Rahman's personal reflections and struggles in making medical decisions that treat a patient as a whole person, not just as a person with a disease.

Review Quotes

"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

"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

"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 and Chair, Department of Leukemia; Samsung
Distinguished University Chair in Cancer Medicine; MD Anderson Cancer Center,
University of Texas

"Fazlur Rahman is a wonderful storyteller. 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