"The Lonely Patient"

When someone is diagnosed with a serious illness, he or she is taking the first step on a challenging and confusing journey. For many, it is as if they are traveling alone to someplace entirely new, with only faded directions back to their old lives. Often, even their loved ones can only guess at what they must be experiencing. Michael Stein, M.D., uses the stories of his own patients to consider the personal narrative of sickness. Beautifully written and keenly insightful, The Lonely Patient is a valuable book for patients and their caregivers as well as a probing inquiry into this universal experience. “Stein has come to understand the emotions that patients experience when illness descends, the feeling that the body has betrayed them, the terror of the unknown, the loss of a legion of familiar comforts, and the loneliness of being kidnapped into the land of the ill.” -The New York Times “A superb doctor and sublime writer, Michael Stein captures the pain, the loneliness, the terrifying arbitrariness of life with illness. The Lonely Patient is the indispensable book for patients and patients’ families. Poetic, profound, original, Stein proves the ideal guide in the journey through the most difficult terrain any of us is likely to traverse.” -Peter Kramer, M.D.