Tales of Pain and Healing, From a Physician Who Knows Both Dr. Eric Manheimer came to identify with his patients not just as their doctor, but as one of them, when he underwent radiation treatment for throat cancer. "This is where Tanisha came, all the way from Brooklyn," Dr. Eric Manheimer said, pointing to a forbiddingly cold stone doorway, as he walked around his old haunts at Bellevue, the nation's oldest and probably most famous public hospital, the other day. "It was the dead of winter," he went on. Tanisha, a teenage foster child, walked across the Williamsburg Bridge to an intake center next to Bellevue to avoid being raped again in the home where she had been placed. She knew the city hospital would have to take her. She had to come here and get admitted to save her life. Most New Yorkers associate Bellevue Hospital Center with the criminally insane, and indeed, it is the place where prisoners in shackles and orange coveralls are sent for treatment. But Dr. Manheimer, 63, sees it as a refuge, a place where those who fear they have exhausted all their options in life often find hope and a last chance at redemption. Tanisha is one of the 12 patients whose stories Dr. Manheimer, Bellevue's medical director for 15 years, tells in his first book, "Twelve Patients: Life and Death at Bellevue Hospital," which was released this week by Grand Central Publishing. He recounted how he came to identify with his patients not just as their doctor, but as one of them - he is, in fact, one of the 12 in the book. His discovery that he had throat cancer makes for one of the more poignant and harrowing chapters of the book. He found that being a patient is lonely. A Hannibal Lecter-type mask was fitted to his face and bolted to a metal table below him to deliver radiation treatment. "You're aware of life going on around you and you're just there, by yourself," Dr. Manheimer said. In between treatments, the mask, labeled MANHEIMER, E., hung on a shelf along with dozens of others, "like fencing masks." He was treated at NYU Langone Medical Center, Bellevue's private sister hospital, because, he says, he did not want to be surrounded by people who knew him. The night before his first treatment, his son's wife went into labor with his first grandchild, at Bellevue. With a tinge of regret, he describes how he was so consumed by his own illness that he had to go home before the baby was born. Seven weeks later, miserable from the treatment, he wanted to discontinue it and allow himself to die. "It was like gradually going into a black hole and going further and further away from everybody around you," he said. His wife insisted that he go on, and saved his life. To all appearances he is back to normal. But the platinum used in his cancer treatment has made it harder to hear and the radiation has restricted his swallowing. "It feels like a dog's leash around your neck all the time," he said. At lunch, he only nibbles at his chicken and refuses dessert. Dr. Manheimer said he had always been fascinated by the personal stories of his patients, and wrote them down, at first just for himself. "I always have these," he said, pulling a notebook from his pocket as he walked Bellevue, leading a tour of the sites described in his book. I have 100 of these for 15 years. So when I wrote my book, I just ransacked my notebooks. Tanisha, like the names of other patients in the book, is a pseudonym. In an afterword, Dr. Manheimer wrote that he disguised the identities of his subjects while leaving intact the "essential details." In an interview, he said that he had changed names and sometimes ages and addresses to protect vulnerable patients, including a "high profile" wealthy drug addict, but that they were not composites. He grew up the son of an internist, in the Bronx, and recalled driving around with his father, Robert, as he made house calls. The family Peugeot was rigged with a spotlight to scout out house numbers on dark streets. "We lived in back of his office," he said the other day. The kitchen was a lab. You'd have your toaster and your centrifuge.