I am the mother of two children, one of which is Suleika’s age at the time she received her cancer diagnosis, and another who recently received his own challenging medical diagnosis. At times, hearing Suleika’s story, as well as hearing the stories of other survivors of extremely difficult circumstances, was difficult. And we got to experience the friendships Suleika formed with other cancer patients, as well as the heartbreak when a couple of those friends succumbed to their illnesses.īy meeting these people, I, as the reader, got to witness various forms of survival and bravery right along with Suleika. The readers also meet a high school teacher in California who lost her bipolar son to suicide. These meetings included a convicted murderer on death row in Texas who had compared his own isolation, small cell, and impending death to the sterile white-walled room she lived in and her own mortality. In the book, she takes readers on a road trip (literally), along with her adopted terrier, Oscar, to meet people who wrote to her while she was undergoing chemotherapy, clinical trials, and a bone marrow transplant.
So while her story is about surviving cancer, it’s also about living once the cancer left her body. In fact, she claims that “the hardest part of my cancer experience began once the cancer was gone.” Suleika is an incredible storyteller, and in Between Two Kingdoms, she takes us on a journey of survival. And that was where Suleika was diagnosed with a rare form of acute myeloid leukemia and given a 35% chance of survival.īut that’s just the beginning. With terrible numbers from blood tests and weak from illness, she was advised to return to New York immediately. Until one day, Suleika collapsed on a sidewalk in Paris. Then came the exhaustion and eventually, the fevers. Basically it was ignored and treated as a minor skin irritation. This itch developed while she was in college, and after being brushed off by doctors, this itch went misdiagnosed and barely treated.
Not an itch to travel and see the world, or an itch to live and work in Paris, but a literal itch on her skin. A new relationship, but by all accounts, Suleika and her boyfriend were exploring love and life in a magnificent city.īut that’s not where Suleika starts her story in Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted. Not long after, Suleika’s boyfriend joined her there. So it will come as no surprise when she used this talent for languages to secure her first job… in Paris! In addition to being fluent in French (Suleika’s first language), she also speaks English (obviously), Arabic, Spanish, and Farsi. By most accounts, Suleika Jaouad was living a young person’s dream shortly after graduating with the highest honors from Princeton with a major in Near Eastern studies and double minors in French and gender studies.
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