Bryant Lin stood in front of his class at Stanford in September, likely one of the last classes he would teach. At only 50 years old and a non-smoker, he had been diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer four months earlier. The disease was terminal, and Lin estimated he had about two years left before the medication he was taking stopped being effective. Instead of retiring from work, he decided to dedicate the fall quarter to teaching a course on his own illness.
The class quickly filled up, with the room overflowing and some students forced to sit on the floor while others were turned away completely.
“It’s truly an honor for me,” Lin said, his voice choked up. “The fact that you all want to be in my class.”
He told his students that he wanted to start with a story that explained why he had chosen to pursue a career in medicine. He took a letter he had received years ago from a patient who was dying of chronic kidney disease. The man and his family had made the decision to stop dialysis, knowing he would soon die.
Lin adjusted his glasses and read, once again with a lump in his throat.
“‘I wanted to thank you for taking such good care of me in my old age’,” he read, quoting his patient. “‘You treated me as you would have treated your own father’.”
Lin said that this final act of gratitude had left a lasting impact on him. He explained that he had created this 10-week course for the medical school faculty, “From Diagnosis to Dialogue: A Doctor’s Real-Time Battle Against Cancer,” with similar intentions.
“This class is part of my letter, part of what I’m doing to give back to my community as I go through this,” he said.
Later, an 18-year-old first-year student at Stanford, in his first week at the university, caught up with a recording of the class, which was also open to non-medical students. The course had filled up before he could enroll, but after emailing Lin, he received permission to follow it online. He had questions that needed answers.
### From Doctor to Patient
Last spring, Lin developed a persistent cough that grew stronger over time. A CT scan revealed a large mass in his lungs, and a bronchoscopy confirmed the diagnosis: cancer. It had metastasized to his liver, bones, and brain, where he had 50 cancerous tumors. He is married and has two teenage children.
The diagnosis was particularly cruel given his work. Lin, a clinical professor and primary care physician, was one of the founders of the Stanford Center for Asian Health Research and Education. One of his priorities has been lung cancer in non-smokers, a disease that disproportionately affects Asian populations.
Describing himself as a “cheerful” person, Lin is known for his boisterous laugh and radio-friendly voice. A former mentor called him the “Pied Piper” of ideas, someone who could gather people around a vision. In addition to his other work, he directs Stanford’s medical humanities program and has patented medical devices.
In all his roles, he insists that people are at the center of medical practice. He said he tries to emulate an “old-fashioned country doctor” and once helped organize a centennial party for one of his patients.
Lin learned that his cancer was progressing rapidly. He felt pain in his spine and ribs, and his weight decreased. His doctor put him on targeted therapy designed to attack the specific mutation causing his cancer. He also underwent chemotherapy, which caused him nausea and mouth sores.
“A day in the life of a cancer patient,” he said in a video journal he started keeping after his diagnosis. “I guess that’s what I’ve become. More than a father or a husband.”
After a few cycles of chemotherapy, his breathing and cough improved, and scans showed drastic reductions in the spread of cancer. He continued to see patients and teach classes, and began to think about what to do with the time he had left.
The dying dialysis patient had written a letter because he wanted Lin to know that he appreciated him. Lin had a couple of ambitions for his own message to his students. He liked to think that some of them, after taking his class, might pursue some aspect of oncology care. And he wanted all of them to understand the humanity that is at the core of medicine.
### The ‘Primary Care’ Model
Lin’s class met for an hour every Wednesday. One week, he led a session on how to have difficult conversations, emphasizing that doctors must be honest enough to say “I don’t know” when necessary, a response he had to accept as a patient in the midst of the uncertainties of his own diagnosis.
In another class, he talked about how spirituality and religion help some patients cope with cancer. Although he is not religious, he said he found comfort in others offering to pray, sing, or light a candle on his behalf.
And in a session on the psychological impact of cancer, Lin talked about the disappointment he felt after a scan showed that some of his tumors had shrunk but not disappeared, because deep down, he still held out hope for a miracle.
He conducted the sessions using what he described as the “primary care” model. He was the initial point of contact, sharing how his cancer diagnosis had affected him, but referring his students to specialists—guest speakers—when further exploration was needed.
One of his first guests was Natalie Lui, a thoracic surgeon and lung cancer expert. Standing in front of a set of slides, she placed Lin’s diagnosis in the broader context of lung cancer among non-smokers, especially in Asian populations.
“In the U.S., about 20 percent of people diagnosed with lung cancer have never smoked,” she said. “But in Asian populations and Asian-American populations, that number could be up to 80 percent in some racial and ethnic groups,” she added, with Chinese women being particularly prone to receiving that diagnosis.
For a class on caregiving, Lin brought in Christine Chan, whom he introduced as “my wonderful wife.” The students, some in lab coats, had been chatting and laughing, but fell silent as the session began. Chairs were moved closer together, and one person stood up to get a better view.
Like her husband, Chan softened hard truths with a smile, looking students in the eye as she spoke. She addressed the students as if they were or would become caregivers themselves.
Chan said that at first, she felt overwhelmed, buried in medical terminology she didn’t understand. Eager to give her husband the best chance of staying healthy, she tried to eliminate processed meats and red meat from his diet, but was disappointed when he rejected some of the new foods she prepared. While she encouraged caregivers to rely on friends and family for support, she cautioned that coordinating well-intentioned offers of help could become a task in itself.
A graduate of MIT and a program manager at Google DeepMind, she acknowledged that setting aside her instinct to plan for the future had been difficult.
“We have to go through this one day at a time,” she said. Lin nodded.
### An Unfinished Business
Watching Lin teach, I often wondered what his students, many of them teenagers and twenty-somethings, were thinking. How did they feel about getting attached to him as a teacher, knowing his prognosis was so dire?
When I asked, some used the phrase “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” to describe the course. Others thought Lin was brave and said that if they were in his shoes, they probably wouldn’t be teaching.
But a significant number of students said they were confused. They had signed up for the course expecting something more “existential,” as one student put it. They were prepared for a gut-wrenching emotional experience. But apart from his voice breaking during the first class, Lin remained firmly optimistic and even made jokes.
When his wife spoke to the students about improving their diet, he feigned alarm: “I said, ‘I don’t eat this food!'” And when he questioned his oncologist, another guest speaker, about what might come next for people who developed resistance to the drug he was taking, Lin joked, “I’m asking for a friend!”
Some students found it difficult to reconcile this optimistic attitude with the seriousness of his diagnosis. Gideon Witchel, from Austin, Texas, was one of them. He was the 18-year-old first-year student who had watched a recording of the first class in his dorm room. A spot opened up shortly after, and now he was enrolled.
When Witchel was 5 years old and his sister 3, their mother, Danielle Witchel, was diagnosed with breast cancer, but he had never talked to her in depth about it. He had never been able to say to her, “Tell me the story of your cancer.” He attended Lin’s class with the hope that it would help him start that conversation.
One of the most intense memories he had of his mother’s illness was playing with her colorful scarves while she sat on the couch, bald. But looking back, he felt uneasy. The idea that she could have died terrified him.
During the spirituality session, the idea of control came up, and that gave Witchel the opening he needed to approach Lin. He stayed after class and asked the professor if he had chosen to teach the class to regain a sense of control over his diagnosis.
Lin responded without hesitation: no. He said he tried not to think about what was beyond his control. “I’m very aware that I have little time left,” he said. “So, I think about that. How am I going to live my life today? Is it worth spending my time on this?”
He said the class was worth it. “Does it make sense?”
“It’s powerful,” said Witchel. “It’s amazing that you’re doing this.”
“You know, I think if I were 20, it would be different,” Lin replied. He said his work as a doctor may have allowed him to confront the situation more quickly than others would. He asked again, “Does it make sense?”
Witchel nodded, and Lin smiled, this time shrugging.
Sometimes, in private, Lin was less optimistic than he seemed in class. More than once, he told me, he looked at the passing of time and thought, “Wow, it’s been a quick week.”
When he saw an older person, he remembered that he probably wouldn’t live to that age. What pained him wasn’t missing out on growing old, but what growing old represented: the opportunity to attend his children’s graduations, to see them grow up and start their own families. The expectation of spending his final years with his wife.
Lin and Chan had talked to their children about his diagnosis, but they weren’t sure they fully understood what it meant. It was hard to think that a man was dying when he seemed as healthy as Lin. “They think that dad can handle everything, fix everything, solve everything,” Lin said.
He referred to the class as his letter to the students, but he had written a real letter to his children for them to read when he was no longer around.
“Whether I am here or not, what I want them to know is that I love them,” he wrote. “Of the many things I have done that have given meaning to my life, being their dad is the greatest of all.”
### The ‘Luckiest Man’
For the final class, held on a sunny December day, Lin and his students gathered in a library at Stanford Hospital. The walls of the room were glass, offering views of the hills and blooming plants in the adjacent rooftop garden. The students overflowed from their designated seats and extended to a group of computers, and the librarian leaned against one of the shelves to observe.
Almost at the end of the class, Lin stood facing the room, folding and unfolding a piece of paper where he had printed his final remarks. It was time to end his letter.
He delivered what he called his version of Lou Gehrig’s farewell speech, referring to the Hall of Fame New York Yankees baseball player who died at 37 of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, an incurable neurological disease.
Lin unfolded the paper again, this time completely.
“Over the last quarter, you’ve been hearing about the bad luck I’ve had,” he said, echoing parts of Gehrig’s speech at Yankee Stadium. “However, today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.”
With that, his voice choked up. “Of course, I’m lucky,” he said. He said he was lucky to have his two children, who brought joy and laughter to his home. To his aides, who made the course possible. To the Stanford community, his colleagues, and the people at the Asian health center. To his students and residents. To his patients. To his friends. To his parents. To his wife.
“So I conclude by saying that I may have had a stroke of bad luck, but I have so much to live for,” he said. “Thank you. It has been an honor.”
It was clear that Lin had achieved at least some of his goals. When he asked the students if they were considering careers related to cancer treatment, about a third raised their hands. Those who planned to be doctors told me they would remember Lin’s story when trying to understand the experience of being sick from their patients.
But the class moved the students in ways Lin had not anticipated. I spoke to several students who said they had advised their parents to get lung cancer screenings. A master’s student told me they were integrating lung cancer vocabulary into the Mandarin class for practicing physicians they planned to help teach in the winter.
For Witchel, the impact of the quarter was more personal. He had finally talked to his mother about her cancer.
He told me his story as we sat at a table outside Tresidder Memorial Union, a student center in the campus center. His mother had come to visit him during the fall, and he had told her about Lin’s class and broached the subject with her. The class had removed the taboo from his thinking, and he could start talking without the discomfort he had previously expected.
He learned that she had something in common with Lin: the letters.
During her illness, Witchel had written messages to family and friends. Some struggled with the uncertainty of whether he would survive, as well as the effect his diagnosis could have on his children. They became a way to process what he was going through and connect with his loved ones.
“There has been a back and forth between a very private experience and a very public one, and both have given me strength,” he wrote in one of them.
After going into remission, he compiled the writings along with medical records, photographs, and other documents into a book tied with a ribbon. When Witchel went home for Thanksgiving, he sat at the kitchen table with the book and his parents, his mother between him and his father.
Together, they alternated reading from the book with conversation. They laughed and cried. For the first time, Witchel felt like he was interacting with his mother as an adult.
In his letters, he heard echoes of Lin’s philosophy. In one passage, his mother wrote about the puzzles scattered around the hospital waiting rooms where she was being treated. Difficult puzzles with hundreds of pieces that “no one could finish however long the wait was.”
Maybe that was the goal, she wrote. Not to finish something, but to try.
In conclusion, Bryant Lin’s journey through teaching a course on his own terminal illness has touched the lives of his students in profound ways. His optimism, bravery, and dedication to his students and the medical field have left a lasting impact. As he faces his own mortality, he continues to inspire others to live each day to the fullest and find strength in the face of adversity.
