Suleika Jaouad is a 24-year-old writer from Saratoga Springs, N.Y. Her column, “Life, Interrupted,” appears weekly in the
New York Times. Suleika chronicles her experience as a young adult with cancer and the unique challenges she faces such as infertility, psychosocial issues, and survivorship.
I first came across her blog several months ago when it came to my inbox as a “Google Alert.” Suleika had written a post about being a young cancer patient facing infertility. She wrote, “Leukemia is an emergency, and oncologists are the first responders: They are trained to beat cancer; everything else must take a back seat. It was only after I asked about fertility that the doctors told me about the available options.” Faced with the harsh reality that her cancer may leave her infertile, she chose to undergo fertility preservation.
The decision to preserve her fertility was not made in haste. Her chronicle of the decision to bank her eggs drew me in and I began to follow her blog regularly. At the time, Suleika only 22, wrote about how being diagnosed with an adult disease ( acute myeloid leukemia – a form of cancer usually reserved for the elderly) thrust her into an adult world she wasn’t quite ready to exist in yet. Still feeling like a child and reliant on her parents in so many ways (emotional, financial, etc…), she was suddenly forced to live her life “out of sequence.”
Yet, deciding to preserve her fertility wasn’t the hardest decision she had to weigh after her initial diagnosis. Moreover, exactly which method was going to be the most effective and least disruptive to her present and future life, proved to be the most difficult decision to make. She writes, “I looked across the table at my boyfriend. We had met only eight months earlier, and here we were, considering the benefits of freezing embryos with his sperm (the option with the greater chance of success) versus freezing only my eggs. It was awkward territory.” Suleika put off the decision for as long as possible, but when pressed by her medical team, within minutes she had made the decision to bank only her eggs.
Suleika went to her appointments at the fertility clinic with her boyfriend, feeling out of place among the other women, wearing her college sweatshirt with the caption, “Class of 2010.” Obviously older than her, the other woman were nonetheless all there for the same reason – hoping to create life, one way or another.
Read more “Life Interrupted,” here.