Before Lance Armstrong was exposed as a drug cheat and bully, his autobiography was the ultimate cancer survivor book. The saga of a man eaten up by testicular cancer and bouncing back to win the gruelling Tour de France seven times in a row was a sure-fire best-seller. The book’s title, ‘It’s Not About the Bike’, was catchy too.
But then Armstrong was outed as a doper and manipulator and stripped of all his Tour titles. Even though his cancer battle may have been authentic, and predated his doping years, the book lost some of its cachet after the revelations.
Now another cancer memoir is showing the kind of pull Armstrong’s story had. ‘Between Two Kingdoms’ by Suleika Jaouad, to be launched on February 9, is her account of being hit by leukemia at 22, surviving it and then embarking on a 15,000-mile road trip with her dog Oscar around the United States.
The story is an extension of Jaouad’s cancer chronicles in The New York Times called ‘Life, Interrupted.’ On her road trip she met various people who had read her blog and reached out to her when she was in hospital, including a death row inmate named L’il GQ.
It was in Paris, of all places, that Jaouad’s world turned dark. In 2010, the daughter of a Tunisian father and Swiss mother graduated from Princeton University and moved to the French capital to pursue her goals. She soon had a job, apartment and a boyfriend. What more could a 22-year-old want?
But strange things started to happen.
“Four or five months after I arrived in Paris, I started feeling increasingly tired,” Jaouad told WBUR News. “I'd find myself sitting at work, wondering if there was a place in the office to take a nap, and after a few weeks of this, my symptoms only worsened. I started getting infections, everything from kidney infections to respiratory infections, which landed me in the hospital for a week and in and out of the emergency room.”
By April 2011, Jaouad was back home in Upstate New York to rest, as advised by doctors in France. Her health continued to sink. She did a bone marrow biopsy. One day she was travelling with her mother on the Amtrak to New York City, when her mother’s phone rang. It was the nurse from the lab. She said they needed to turn back and return home.
“That’s when we knew that something was seriously wrong,” Jaouad said.
After four years of intensive treatment, the cancer left her body. But a bit like Morgan Freeman after his release from jail in The Shawshank Redemption, Jaouad struggled to find peace or purpose in the normal world, especially with the punishment her mind and body had taken. So she hit the road, little Oscar by her side.
Jaouad is candid that the journey did not bring about nirvana. But it helped her to cope with the reality of her present.
“I wish I could say that since coming home from my road trip, I feel fully healed. I don't,” Jaouad said in a TED Talk. “But once I stopped expecting myself to return to the person I'd been pre-diagnosis, once I learned to accept my body and its limitations, I actually did start to feel better. I think that's the trick: to stop seeing our health as binary, between sick and healthy, well and unwell, whole and broken; to stop thinking that there's some beautiful, perfect state of wellness to strive for; and to quit living in a state of constant dissatisfaction until we reach it.”
Jaouad dwelt on the point some more.
“Every single one of us will have our life interrupted, whether it's by the rip cord of a diagnosis or some other kind of heartbreak or trauma that brings us to the floor,” she said. “We need to find ways to live in the in-between place, managing whatever body and mind we currently have.”
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