The story of a recovery from a crippling disease and the physician patient partnership that beat the odds by using the patient's own capabilities.

For many doctors, their role as powerful healer precludes thoughts of ever getting sick themselves. When they do, it initiates a profound shift of awareness-- not only in their sense of their selves, which is invariably bound up with the "invincible doctor" role, but in the way that they view their patients and the doctor-patient relationship. While some books have been written from first-person perspectives on doctors who get sick-- by Oliver Sacks among them-- and TV shows like "House" touch on the topic, never has there been a "systematic, integrated look" at what the experience is like for doctors who get sick, and what it can teach us about our current health care system and more broadly, the experience of becoming ill.The psychiatrist Robert Klitzman here weaves together gripping first-person accounts of the experience of doctors who fall ill and see the other side of the coin, as a patient. The accounts reveal how dramatic this transformation can be-- a spiritual journey for some, a radical change of identity for others, and for some a new way of looking at the risks and benefits of treatment options. For most however it forever changes the way they treat their own patients. These questions are important not just on a human interest level, but for what they teach us about medicine in America today. While medical technology advances, the health care system itself has become more complex and frustrating, and physician-patient trust is at an all-time low. The experiences offered here are unique resource that point the way to a more humane future.

The Wrong Side of an Illness: A Doctor's Love Story is a non-fiction novel based on the memoirs of a general hospital psychiatrist whose life is turned upside down by physical signs of his wife's silent illness. What follows is his extraordinary account of their journey through her battle with ovarian cancer. His ability to translate emotion into prose allows him to share with his reader the subtle nuances of the narrator's altered role, the family's experience, the complexity of medical interactions in the setting of tragic illness, and the hope that follows from a loving marriage and a fulfilling career of patient care. Her fatal illness is the subject of a candid narration of love, loss, and recovery.

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year: “Unforgettable . . . Few have told such a compelling life-story as skillfully” (San Francisco Chronicle). In the summer of 1992, on the eve of an American tour, singer/songwriter Ben Watt, one half of the Billboard-topping pop duo Everything But The Girl, was taken to a London hospital complaining of chest pain. As his condition worsened, doctors were baffled. He was eventually he was diagnosed with a rare life-threatening autoimmune disease called Churg-Strauss Syndrome. “To paraphrase Joseph Heller,” Ben says, “you know it’s something serious when they name it after two guys.” By the time he came home, two-and-half-months later, his ravaged body was forty-six pounds lighter, and he was missing most of his small intestine. “Unfold[ing] like a page-turning mystery” (The Los Angeles Times), and “told with great wit and without self-pity, Patient is a sobering look at how life can suddenly be transformed into a humbling vaudeville of tests, IV’s, catheters, and bedpans” (The New York Times Book Review). Injecting a frankness and natural humility into his “funny, frightening, and piercingly vulnerable” (Interview) chronicle of a medical nightmare, Ben writes about his childhood, reflects on family, and his shared life with band member and partner, Tracey Thorn. The result is “a vivid, finely wrought look at having one’s future yanked away, and surviving physically and emotionally” (Dallas Morning Star-Telegram). A Sunday Times Book of the Year A Village Voice Favorite Book of the Year An Esquire (UK) Best Non-Fiction Award Finalist