The Light Within: The Extraordinary Friendship of a Doctor and Patient Brought Together by Cancer - Hardcover

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Lois M. Ramondetta, M.D., is an attending physician and associate professor of gynecologic oncology at the University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center. She has published and lectured extensively on the care of gynecologic cancers as well as written reflective articles for academic journals. She lives with her husband and daughters in Pearland, Texas.

Deborah Rose Sills was a professor of religion at California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks, California, from 1990 to 2006. Trained as a historian of comparative religions, she taught and lectured at a number of colleges and universities in the United States and abroad on various topics such as global religion, women and religion, religion and film, and cancer and spirituality. She is survived by her husband and two children.

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The luminous true story of a friendship that shed the boundaries of the doctor-patient relationship and became less a confrontation with death than a celebration of the joys of life

When young gynecologic oncology fellow Lois Ramondetta was first summoned to the room of a new patient, neither she nor the forty-nine-year-old professor of religion she encountered named Deborah Sills thought they had much in common. They certainly had no idea that they were about to embark on a transcendent odyssey that would become a soul-deep friendship. Now their heartfelt story, The Light Within, follows these two women through a decade of friendship and "big lives"—husbands, children, friends, and careers—ultimately crossing the country and traveling to foreign lands, where they spoke and wrote together about the intersection of doctors, patients, and spirituality. Both women searched together and openly for answers with honesty and intimacy until Deborah passed away in the spring of 2006.