Dr. Bryant Lin, a professor of medicine at Stanford, decided to teach a course about cancer. The 50-year-old nonsmoker had been diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer and decided to use his own terminal disease to help students understand the humanity at the core of medicine. “From Diagnosis to Dialogue: A Doctor’s Real-Time Battle with Cancer” was Dr. Lin’s “part of what I’m doing to give back to my community as I go through this,” he said.
Dr. Lin told The New York Times that he tries to stress how people are at the heart of medical practice. Trying to emulate an “old-timey country doctor,” he said the course was a way to hopefully encourage some students to dedicate themselves to a form of cancer care.
The course focused on topics such as having difficult conversations, how spirituality and religion can help some patients cope, the psychological impacts of cancer and more. Dr. Lin brough in guests to discuss matters such as caregiving and lung cancer among nonsmokers and its particular impact on Asian populations.
Dr. Lin met with his class for the last time back in December. He gave a farewell speech, referencing baseball player Lou Gehrig’s goodbye before he died at 37 years old from A.L.S. “For the past quarter,” he told students, “you’ve been hearing about the bad break I got. Yet today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.” He called himself lucky to be a husband and father, thanking his teaching assistants, colleagues, people at the Asian health center and the Stanford community. “So I close in saying that I may have had a tough break,” he said, “but I have an awful lot to live for. Thank you. And it’s been an honor.”
Read more of Dr. Lin’s story here.
