Top 99 Quotes & Sayings by Suleika Jaouad

With a Catholic mother and a Muslim father, I've always had a great interest in religion, but I've never practiced one myself. After I received a diagnosis of an aggressive form of leukemia at the age of 22, I put my faith in medicine.

Getting diagnosed with cancer at 22 really magnified the in-betweenness that I felt. All of my friends were starting careers and going to parties and dating, and I was stuck - literally - in this one hospital bed for weeks on end.

Youth and health are supposed to go hand in hand. And it was only when I got to a point where I was so weak, it was a struggle to walk up and down the stairs that I found myself in an emergency room. And within 24 hours I was on a plane back home to upstate New York, and I got the bone marrow biopsy that led to my actual diagnosis.

I'll never go so far to call cancer a gift. It's a really terrible disease. It's taken the lives of so many of my fellow friends in the oncology unit. But like any life-interrupted moment, there are silver linings.

I think another aspect of being a young adult with cancer is that most of your friends, hopefully, you know, have never had to experience life-threatening illnesses themselves.

I remember working as a paralegal at a law firm, being so exhausted that, midday, I would go to the utility closet to take a nap. And to me, that wasn't the evidence of a serious illness; it was evidence that somehow I wasn't able to work long hours or to work as hard as the people around me.

I think for a lot of women, when we find ourselves in the doctor's office, there's a kind of power dynamic there where sometimes it's difficult to push back, to ask questions, to be persistenr.

We have birthdays and bar mitzvahs and funerals and weddings. And these ceremonies and rituals, I believe, really help us transition from one point to another.

During the first year of my cancer treatment, adopting a dog was out of the question. I spent more time in the hospital than out. And in the time I was able to spend at home, I had to live in a germ-free bubble to protect my fragile immune system.

Ever since a therapy dog visited me in the hospital during my first cycle of chemotherapy in May 2011, I became fixated on the idea of having a dog of my own one day.

At the age of 22, I began to consider my own mortality. It had never occurred to me that, with all of the progress that has been made in cancer research, none of the standard treatments would work for me.

The hero's journey is, you know, one of the oldest story arcs that we have. And it's one, I think, that's especially projected onto cancer patients.

Survivorship comes with unspoken pressures, responsibilities and challenges. After all, what is the point of saving a life if the life isn't a meaningful one?

Cancer has made me mentally and spiritually stronger. But as my life starts to go back to normal, I find that some of my old, bad habits are still lurking in the shadows.

I've found that I do some of my best thinking during our early morning walks - those few hours after the garbage trucks have gone and before the coffee shops open when Manhattan is as asleep as it ever will be. For that one hour each morning, I'm focused on the now.

To say that I'm healed, uh, would be to imply that there's an endpoint. And I think healing is something that we all do, that we'll all continually do, for the rest of our lives.

To set a 100-day plan was to will myself into the future, no matter how uncertain it seemed.

While an increasing number of cancer treatment centers have begun offering post-treatment care plans and support groups to help patients navigate these challenges, many patients continue to fall through the cracks.

But no conversation between doctor and patient can magically turn an uninsured patient into an insured one. Doctors are just as helpless as patients when it comes to solving the problems of the uninsured.

And there came a point in my treatment where I couldn't see that end in sight. And that was the most challenging, I think, to know how to kind of anchor yourself when you're swimming in a sea of uncertainty.

Often when I wake up in the morning and I'm thinking about my day, I try to imagine if I only had three hours today to do anything, what would feel most important to me.

One of the hardest parts about developing leukemia at age 22 was how restrictive it was: My treatments left me highly susceptible to infection and with limited mobility.

For my 100-day project, I decided to keep a journal. It could be just one sentence. Often, it was just one word, occasionally the F-word. But it gave me a sense of structure.

It is hard not to speak in cliches about cancer. It can be even harder not to feel as if I have to live up to those cliches. I sometimes feel a deep sense of guilt for not doing a better job of making lemonade out of metaphorical lemons.

Well, writing for me had always been my first love and what I leaned on as a way to kind of endure difficult passages.

The bone marrow transplant procedure itself can be dangerous, but it is swift, which makes it feel strangely anti-climactic.

I think one of the difficult things for me was that I was putting on a brave face for my loved ones; they were putting on a brave face for me. But what got lost in that was the ability to talk about our fear.

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!

My column launched while I was in the bone marrow transplant unit. And I remember waking up the next morning and opening my inbox and seeing hundreds of emails from strangers all around the world.

The steep price tag of cancer treatment needs to continue to be a part of the national conversation, not just the patient-doctor one.

Cancer didn't have to be permanent; in my case, I'm lucky that my cancer is curable, but infertility was. And it was the first time I realized that cancer wasn't just something seasonal; it wasn't something that was going to pass with the summer. It was something that was going to change my life forever.

It felt like 10 years, but I was actually in treatment for three-and-a-half years. I finally finished in April. Two years ago, I had a bone marrow transplant from my brother, which saved my life, so I feel really grateful.

It took me a long time to be able to say I was a cancer patient. Then, for a long time, I was only that: A cancer patient.

I'm a triple citizen of the United States, in Switzerland and Tunisia. And actually beyond just my immediate family, all of my family is abroad.

And journaling became the place that I was able to find a sense of narrative control at a time when I had to cede so much control to others. It really - it became the place where I began to interrogate my predicament and to try to excavate some meaning from it.

Whether we're too embarrassed or shy - or worried that a discussion about cost might affect the quality of our care - it's clear that both doctors and patients need to do more communicating.

Growing up, I had always been an avid bookworm and a straight-A student. I approached my cancer the same way I approached writing my senior thesis in college: I buried my head in research journals, interviewed experts and scoured the Internet for information.

In the world of medicine, a trial refers to clinical research that follows a predefined plan or protocol. A clinical trial must comply with strict health, safety and ethical regulations determined by the Food and Drug Administration.

Being in your twenties and trying to figure out who you are and what you want to do in life - with or without cancer - is a scary endeavor on its own.

For the better half of my early 20s, I was Bubble Girl. When I found out I had leukemia at 22 my world suddenly dwindled to four white walls, a hospital bed, fluorescent lights and a thicket of tubes and wires connecting me to an IV pole.

Getting healthy means listening to my body - and no longer comparing myself with other people at the gym. Getting healthy means being satisfied with small, sustainable, incremental changes to my diet and lifestyle.

Like a lot of other cancer patients lying in hospital beds or in chemotherapy suites, I have spent a fair amount of time fantasizing about jetting off to a tropical island.

I get along well with my medical team and I have a tremendous amount of respect for them. But the idea of discussing my finances during a doctor's appointment makes me uncomfortable.

After college, I moved to Paris to work as a paralegal. I hadn't been feeling well throughout most of my senior year of college, but I chalked it up to burning the candle at both ends. After I started my job, I began feeling more and more tired.

Every single one of us will have our life interrupted, whether it's by the ripcord of a diagnosis or some other kind of heartbreak or trauma that brings us to the floor. We need to find a way to live in the in-between place, managing whatever body and mind we currently have.

So, you know, when I think of survival as a creative act, it's not trying to plaster over the isolation or to, you know, rewrite your predicament into something positive with a happy ending or some kind of neat resolution. It's writing into the unknown.

I joke that I was basically born and raised in airports. I feel most at home at JFK.

A growing body of evidence suggests that cancer survivors continue to struggle with medical, financial, professional and psychosocial issues long after the end of their cancer treatment.

Isolated in the oncology ward, I began to think about my dream to become a writer.

I think often when we talk about things like cancer, the kind of final act at the end of the story comes with a cure. But we don't talk a lot about what happens after. And it took me a while to even acknowledge to myself how much I was struggling.

Cancer isn't something that makes you want to share, it's something that makes you want to hide.

Being sick and young is hard in all the ways you might imagine and more, but mostly it can be incredibly boring.

You know, illness is not something that ever crossed my mind until I got diagnosed with leukemia two years ago at the age of 22. And I don't take things for granted anymore.

When opportunities and possibilities feel foreclosed upon, when you're living with limitations, as I was, you have to find creative workarounds to exist, to hold on to some sense of self, to explore new parts of yourself that are emerging.

In my darkest days in the oncology unit, I promised myself that if I ever got into remission one day, I would become a stronger, healthier and better version of my precancer self.

When you are talking to a dog about cancer, there are no judgments or taboos.

And I had this sense, even though I couldn't quite wrap my head around what it meant to have a cancer diagnosis at 22, that the person I'd been before was buried, there was no returning to that pre diagnosis itself.

Before my diagnosis with leukemia, two years ago at the age of 22, I'd always excelled at making resolutions. But I was never as good at keeping them.

I was born in New York but grew up between Switzerland, where my mom is from, and Tunisia, where my dad is from. Now I live in the East Village in New York, in the same building where my parents lived when I was born, so I've come full circle in my life.

Just a few years ago, at the age of 22, I learned I had an aggressive form of leukemia. I needed intensive chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant to save my life. Back then, my doctors told me that I had a 35 percent chance of surviving my transplant.