SIT STAY HEAL is a moving and uplifting memoir of an esteemed veterinary oncologist fighting to save her four-legged patients while making sense of her own unexpected cancer diagnosis.

Dogs don’t use words to communicate their feelings, but Dr. Renee Alsarraf comprehends those feelings nonetheless. Hers is a profession of extraordinary and radical empathy, where in addition to laboratory tests, she uses a keen awareness of the language and behavior of dogs to locate disease so she can treat it. At the height of her esteemed career as a veterinary oncologist, with a teenage son and a loving partner who relied on her, Renee found herself on the patient’s table. She was diagnosed with cancer – the disease she had dedicated her life to preventing and treating in dogs - and given only a short time to live.

When our dogs are diagnosed with cancer, they go on living as happy as the day they walked into the veterinary office. They chew bones, bark at the mailman, sneak on the sofa, and seek out their human family for affection. It is humans that struggle through endless questions of meaning and purpose and life’s fragility and uncertainty, to a fault. As Renee discovered using the specialized animal sensitivity she had accumulated over her hugely successful career, our dog counterparts are wise in a way humans are not. They do not sacrifice the moment. They do not waste the present. They treat every breath like the gift that it is.

Each chapter is about a different patient and what that family or Renee learned from their dog. Woven through the chapters is her backstory as a working mom dealing with her own cancer. There are some stories that will elicit tears and some stories that are funny and heart-warming. Overall it is an inspirational tribute to the human-animal bond in its deepest form. Life lessons from dogs.