Jaouad told Axelrod, 'To imagine yourself in the future is a radical act of hope. Let's face it: life can be good.'Ī joyful, fearless teenage survivor in Florida named Unique, who said, 'I wanna, like, go on a food binge and just eat crazy things like octopus.' He told her, 'You get immersed in life again. 'I would have to figure out a way, not to move on, because I don't think that's possible, but to move forward.'įrom the chest where she kept letters from her readers, she chose 22 letters, and hit the road with her dog, Oscar, for a 100-day, 15,000-mile reset ritual, meeting strangers she felt had something to teach her about healing.Īmong them: A professor named Howard in Ohio, who helped her find her footing in a precarious new life. 'But you knew that you didn't want your life to be defined by the worst thing that ever happened to you?' Axelrod asked. I couldn't return to the person I've been pre-diagnosis. No longer sick, but not exactly well, either. 'Yeah, there you go! Or workaholism, I don't know,' she laughed.Īfter a traumatic three-and-a-half-year ordeal of treatment, including that last-chance bone marrow transplant that carried a life-threatening risk of heart failure and organ damage, Jaouad beat the odds – she was cancer-free. 'There's a photograph of me in the transplant unit where I have a vomit bucket under one arm, I have my laptop on my knees, and I'm crying, not because, you know, I'm about to have a bone marrow transplant, but because I've missed a deadline!' Suleika Jaouad. Overnight, Jaouad had what she had yearned for most: purpose. And I remember waking up the next morning and opening my inbox and seeing hundreds of emails from strangers all around the world.' Jaouad said, 'My column launched while I was in the bone marrow transplant unit. She would not take back what she suffered to gain this knowledge and experiences.Facing Cancer in Your 20s - Life, Interrupted | The New York Times by And the realization that she would not reverse her diagnosis if she could. The awareness that haunts her and most of everyone – it can all be lost in a moment. It is possible for you to alter the course of your becoming. She learns many things as one can do when traveling alone. with her dog Oscar, visiting some of those people who wrote and corresponded with her that 4 years while she was in the hospital. She decides to reenter the world again by going on a 100-day project of traveling around the U.S.

She writes with a fervor… death being the great motivator. She begins to write on the advice that as if we are all dying because in the end we are all terminal patients on this earth- the mystery being not if, but when. She spends the next 4 years in hospital beds and begins chronicling her life in the NY Times. The author develops leukemia in her early twenties given a 35% chance of survival… the dreams we all have in youth, the life imagined, just vanishes.

Suleika jaouad between two kingdoms