Before the COVID-19 pandemic, a young girl who recently graduated from Georgetown had a stroke. Physical therapist Farris Fakhoury (‘08) took her in as his patient.
While rehabilitating from her stroke, she loved the work that Fakhoury did to help her recover. She told him he should write a book.
“I was like, I cannot write a book,” Fakhoury said. “She was the catalyst for me in taking the journey a couple of years ago and doing it. She introduced me to her professor from Georgetown, who sort of ran this program to help people pretty much write a book.”
After working through the program during the pandemic, Fakhoury published his book, The Happiness Perspective: Learning to Reframe Our Physical Trauma into Hope, Happiness and Connection, in December 2020.
Fakhoury graduated from Villanova with a degree in psychology and walked on to the men’s soccer team, where he was a captain his senior year.
He currently runs the amputee program at the Kessler Institute, a rehab hospital up in North Jersey. He works with individuals who have had life-changing injuries like stroke, brain and spinal cord injuries.
After Villanova, he graduated from Rutgers University’s three-year physical therapy school.
“Before that, the [book] was never really something on my radar that I thought I could do or wanted to,” Fakhoury said. “But a lot of what I see on a day-to-day really was getting to me early on in my career, like the life-changing injuries. And then one thing that helped me sort of navigate that and cope with some of the stuff I was seeing was just journaling and writing things down.”
The book explores the importance of happiness in relation to traumatic life incidents, especially injuries.
“A lot of the patients I deal with, the happiest ones are not the ones who make the best recovery,” he said. “They’re really the ones with the best mindset. The whole book is all about happiness and how to find that happiness, despite some of the challenges and obstacles that life throws at us.”
Falkhoury currently works in the outpatient setting of the Kessler Institute. He works with eight to sometimes more than1 6 patients per day.
The goal is to get patients back to normal life while adjusting to or overcoming their impairments or functional limitations.
“Sometimes I’m working on their gait training, teaching them how to walk,” Falkhoury said. “Unfortunately, the reality of a lot of the patients I work with [is that] they’re going to have some sort of impairments a lot of times after a stroke or a brain injury. They’re not getting back to 100%. So we’re working on a variety of different things based on sort of what their needs are and what their goals are.”
Even though Falkhoury graduated from Villanova 17 years ago, he is still involved as an alumnus. Over the years, he has collaborated with Irene Kan, the chair of Villanova’s psychology department. Originally from North Jersey, Falkhoury moved to the Philadelphia area around three and a half years ago and currently resides there.
