Our Connected Lives: Caring for Cancer Patients in Rural Texas

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 one's own life or leaving 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.