A Quote by Suleika Jaouad

After my diagnosis at age 22 with leukemia, the second piece of news I learned was that I would likely be infertile as a result of chemotherapy. It was a one-two punch that was my first indication that issues of cancer and sexual health are inextricably tied.
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.
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.
Two to 4% of cancers respond to chemotherapy....The bottom line is for a few kinds of cancer chemo is a life extending procedure-Hodgkin's disease, Acute Lymphocytic Leukemia (ALL), Testicular cancer, and Choriocarcinoma.
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.
The first punch I learned was the jab. Second, the cross punch; third, the hook - after that, all the combinations and how to move my head and feet. It took me just two months to be ready to get in the ring!
The great success stories of chemotherapy were always in relatively obscure types of cancer. Childhood leukemia constitutes less than two percent of all cancers and many of chemotherapy's other successes were in diseases so rare that many clinicians had never even seen a single case
Soon enough I would learn the specific diagnosis: myelodysplastic syndrome, a disorder of the bone marrow. In my case, the disease growing inside me had morphed into acute myeloid leukemia. I would need intensive chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant to save my life.
Traveling gave me the opportunity to reinvent myself. You can imagine my excitement when, one year after my bone marrow transplant and two years after my cancer diagnosis, my doctors gave me permission to take my first big trip since cancer. Freedom, finally!
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.
There are three types of chemotherapy that work for cancer. Testicular, like Lance Armstrong. Childhood leukemia, they're doing great things. And lymphoma and non-Hodgkin's.
When I was diagnosed with cancer at age 22, I learned just how much cancer affects families when it affects individuals.
A study was done which shows the majority of oncologists who refer patients for chemotherapy for lung cancer would not themselves take chemotherapy for lung cancer. And in fact if the chemotherapy involved cis-platen, something like 75% of them said they wouldn't take it. But what do these people do all day long? They're sending people for cis-platen.
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.
I've struggled with the awkwardness of cancer ever since my leukemia was diagnosed last May. When I told people my news, some people froze, falling silent. One person immediately began telling a story of an aunt who had died from the same kind of leukemia.
What I quickly learned after my diagnosis is that the world of a cancer patient has many parts and a good deal of uncertainty.
I think one possibility [in the future] might be chemotherapy. And I'm always hesitant to say that because it makes it sound like I'm against chemotherapy. Right now, chemotherapy is the best cancer treatment therapy we have. But let's say we find some way where we can almost genetically engineer the DNA of our being and fight cancer that way. Then, the idea that we used to pump poison into people to fight off cancer will almost seem like the use of leeches or something.
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