I wrote about the kind of mysterious happenings in my body. I recorded snippets of overheard conversations at the nurses' coffee station. And in that journal, I wrote about everything. Often, it was just one word, occasionally the F-word. JAOUAD: For my 100-day project, I decided to keep a journal. For my dad, he wrote a hundred childhood memories that he compiled into a little booklet and gave to me. For my mom, that meant painting a ceramic tile every day for a hundred days that she later assembled into a shield and hung above my bed and told me it had protective powers.
So it really began with something my friends and family called a hundred-day project. But it seemed hard to know what I could possibly write about now when I couldn't travel anywhere, when I couldn't interview anyone, when I couldn't even leave my room. JAOUAD: Well, writing for me had always been my first love and what I leaned on as a way to kind of endure difficult passages. When that was no longer possible, you started to write about your cancer. GARCIA-NAVARRO: You write about how after you graduated from college, you had dreamed of being a foreign correspondent. I was crossing over into a new land, and with every step, I was feeling less like Suleika. As I was wheeled back to the oncology ward, I noticed that the sign outside my hospital room read S. On some level, I was starting to realize that the life I'd had before was shattered, the person I'd been buried. Up until this moment, with the exception of the mouth sores, my illness had been largely invisible. Protruding from a wound below my collarbone, I saw a plastic tube with three dangling lumens, like the tentacles of some abhorrent sea creature. JAOUAD: (Reading) When I woke up in the surgical recovery room, I looked down at my bloodied chest. I'd like to begin with you reading a paragraph from the first morning you entered the hospital in New York City on what you call a perfect spring morning. GARCIA-NAVARRO: It's heartbreaking to read, but you write beautifully about how cancer split your life essentially into two parts, you know, before and after. Suleika Jaouad spent the next few years being treated for cancer and documenting it in a series of blog posts and videos for a column in The New York Times and now in her memoir "Between Two Kingdoms." And she's here to talk about it. It was a time of hope and excitement until the itch got worse and turned into six-hour naps, mouth sores, weight loss and ultimately a diagnosis - leukemia with a 35% chance of survival. She'd just graduated from college, moved to France and fallen in love.
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