Prof. Dr. Thomas Bein was heading up an intensive care unit at Universitätsklinikum Regensburg when he was diagnosed with bone marrow cancer. From then on, the top medic was himself a patient of high-tech medicine. He experienced what it feels like to receive a cancer diagnosis and what it means to go through chemotherapy, to lose control of your own body and to learn to live with the disease. The experience of the ICU doctor always comes back to the question that he asked before his illness: how do his actions affect his patients. Thomas Bein impressively describes what he has learned about the autonomy and dignity of the most ill patients in day-to-day clinic life - and what needs to urgently change.
