Lonely Patient: How We Experience Illness

When someone is diagnosed with a serious illness, he or she is taking the first step on an overwhelmingly challenging and confusing journey. For many, it is as if they are traveling to someplace entirely new and they must go there alone, with only faded directions back to their old lives. Often, even their loved ones can only guess at what they must be experiencing.

The Lonely Patient is a clear-eyed and deeply affecting examination of the inner life of those grappling with illness. It looks into the chasm between the well and the sick by exploring and giving voice to the often unarticulated aspects of illness, offering people with illness--and their family and friends--a frank and intelligent discussion of how to negotiate the psychological and emotional aspects of what they are going through.

Michael Stein, M.D., a professor of medicine at Brown University Medical School as well as an acclaimed novelist, uses the stories of a number of patients, including that of his beloved, terminally ill brother-in-law, Richard, to consider the personal narrative of sickness. What sets Stein's book apart is his intimate scrutiny of the uniqueness of each patient's experience, which he breaks into four parts--betrayal, terror, loss, and loneliness--and renders each in such a way that he opens a dialogue about our expectations of health and, after its shocking disappearance, of illness.

Beautifully written and keenly insightful, The Lonely Patient is a valuable book for patients and their caregivers--as well as a probing inquiry into a universal experience.

Publishers Weekly

Beautifully written, this is a look into the hearts and minds of people suffering serious illness: into the terrors that they often don't express directly. Stein centers his investigation on his brother-in-law Richard, diagnosed with a rare sinus cancer at the age of 50. According to Stein, a professor at the Brown University School of Medicine and a novelist (The Lynching Tree), such patients pass through four emotional stages-betrayal, terror, loneliness and loss-which he illustrates with riveting case studies. One patient had a mysterious bump on his head; because of his fear of anesthesia, he decided to forgo a necessary operation. Stein's most expressive prose evokes the isolated world of the patient, who is locked into a limited existence, confined in a hospital room or at home, exemplified at its most extreme by a quadriplegic who feels completely shut in to "a strange indoor island world." Stein says he now understands the importance of taking the hand of a fearful patient, who need not display courage in front of physicians. This is a moving and eloquent testimony from a caring practitioner. (Feb.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Michael Stein is the author of the award-winning The Lonely Patient as well as five novels. He has been treating addiction for more than twenty years and is a professor of medicine and community health at Brown University.