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.Collection: Faith
Getting diagnosed with cancer at 22 really magnified the in-betweenness that I felt. All of my friends were starting careers and going to parties and dating, and I was stuck - literally - in this one hospital bed for weeks on end.Collection: Dating
The first time I fantasized about early retirement, I was 22 years old. It was a rainy spring morning in Paris, and as I waited for the Metro to take me to my new paralegal job, it occurred to me that I'd rather be sleeping in, or playing hooky at the movies, or sailing around the world.Collection: Morning
Today, at age 24, when my peers are dating, marrying and having children of their own, my cancer treatments are causing internal and external changes in my body that leave me feeling confused, vulnerable, frustrated - and verifiably unsexy.Collection: Dating
I was born in New York but grew up between Switzerland, where my mom is from, and Tunisia, where my dad is from. Now I live in the East Village in New York, in the same building where my parents lived when I was born, so I've come full circle in my life.Collection: Mom
I think one of the difficult things for me was that I was putting on a brave face for my loved ones; they were putting on a brave face for me. But what got lost in that was the ability to talk about our fear.Collection: Fear
So, you know, when I think of survival as a creative act, it's not trying to plaster over the isolation or to, you know, rewrite your predicament into something positive with a happy ending or some kind of neat resolution. It's writing into the unknown.Collection: Positive
Our culture is steeped in positive thinking - from the self-help mega-industry to college courses in positive psychology to the enduring pull of the American dream. There is no dislike button on Facebook. Nobody wants to be a downer.Collection: Positive
Every single one of us will have our life interrupted, whether it's by the ripcord of a diagnosis or some other kind of heartbreak or trauma that brings us to the floor. We need to find a way to live in the in-between place, managing whatever body and mind we currently have.
Today, my brother and I share almost identical DNA, the result of a successful bone marrow transplant I had last April using his healthy stem cells. But Adam and I couldn't be more different.
I've found that I do some of my best thinking during our early morning walks - those few hours after the garbage trucks have gone and before the coffee shops open when Manhattan is as asleep as it ever will be. For that one hour each morning, I'm focused on the now.
To say that I'm healed, uh, would be to imply that there's an endpoint. And I think healing is something that we all do, that we'll all continually do, for the rest of our lives.
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.
It felt like 10 years, but I was actually in treatment for three-and-a-half years. I finally finished in April. Two years ago, I had a bone marrow transplant from my brother, which saved my life, so I feel really grateful.
The bone marrow transplant procedure itself can be dangerous, but it is swift, which makes it feel strangely anti-climactic.
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.
When opportunities and possibilities feel foreclosed upon, when you're living with limitations, as I was, you have to find creative workarounds to exist, to hold on to some sense of self, to explore new parts of yourself that are emerging.
When you are talking to a dog about cancer, there are no judgments or taboos.
I remember working as a paralegal at a law firm, being so exhausted that, midday, I would go to the utility closet to take a nap. And to me, that wasn't the evidence of a serious illness; it was evidence that somehow I wasn't able to work long hours or to work as hard as the people around me.
The steep price tag of cancer treatment needs to continue to be a part of the national conversation, not just the patient-doctor one.
I'm a triple citizen of the United States, in Switzerland and Tunisia. And actually beyond just my immediate family, all of my family is abroad.
My own cancer experience has taught me that the most comforting words from friends have often been both the simplest and the most honest.
Having cancer changed the way I ate and thought about food. My symptoms dictated my eating habits. The sores in my mouth and the bouts of nausea, for instance, stole the pleasure of eating and made it an ordeal. At some points in my treatment, eating wasn't even an option.
For the better half of my early 20s, I was Bubble Girl. When I found out I had leukemia at 22 my world suddenly dwindled to four white walls, a hospital bed, fluorescent lights and a thicket of tubes and wires connecting me to an IV pole.
Well, writing for me had always been my first love and what I leaned on as a way to kind of endure difficult passages.
For my 100-day project, I decided to keep a journal. It could be just one sentence. Often, it was just one word, occasionally the F-word. But it gave me a sense of structure.
The hero's journey is, you know, one of the oldest story arcs that we have. And it's one, I think, that's especially projected onto cancer patients.
We have birthdays and bar mitzvahs and funerals and weddings. And these ceremonies and rituals, I believe, really help us transition from one point to another.
Youth and health are supposed to go hand in hand. And it was only when I got to a point where I was so weak, it was a struggle to walk up and down the stairs that I found myself in an emergency room. And within 24 hours I was on a plane back home to upstate New York, and I got the bone marrow biopsy that led to my actual diagnosis.
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.
And there came a point in my treatment where I couldn't see that end in sight. And that was the most challenging, I think, to know how to kind of anchor yourself when you're swimming in a sea of uncertainty.
I think often when we talk about things like cancer, the kind of final act at the end of the story comes with a cure. But we don't talk a lot about what happens after. And it took me a while to even acknowledge to myself how much I was struggling.
My column launched while I was in the bone marrow transplant unit. And I remember waking up the next morning and opening my inbox and seeing hundreds of emails from strangers all around the world.
There's a photograph of me in the transplant unit where I have a vomit bucket under one arm, I have my laptop on my knees, and I'm crying, not because, you know, I'm about to have a bone marrow transplant, but because I've missed a deadline!
Cancer didn't have to be permanent; in my case, I'm lucky that my cancer is curable, but infertility was. And it was the first time I realized that cancer wasn't just something seasonal; it wasn't something that was going to pass with the summer. It was something that was going to change my life forever.
I think another aspect of being a young adult with cancer is that most of your friends, hopefully, you know, have never had to experience life-threatening illnesses themselves.
After college, I moved to Paris to work as a paralegal. I hadn't been feeling well throughout most of my senior year of college, but I chalked it up to burning the candle at both ends. After I started my job, I began feeling more and more tired.
And journaling became the place that I was able to find a sense of narrative control at a time when I had to cede so much control to others. It really - it became the place where I began to interrogate my predicament and to try to excavate some meaning from it.
I joke that I was basically born and raised in airports. I feel most at home at JFK.
I'll never go so far to call cancer a gift. It's a really terrible disease. It's taken the lives of so many of my fellow friends in the oncology unit. But like any life-interrupted moment, there are silver linings.
I think for a lot of women, when we find ourselves in the doctor's office, there's a kind of power dynamic there where sometimes it's difficult to push back, to ask questions, to be persistenr.
Often when I wake up in the morning and I'm thinking about my day, I try to imagine if I only had three hours today to do anything, what would feel most important to me.
Growing up, I had always been an avid bookworm and a straight-A student. I approached my cancer the same way I approached writing my senior thesis in college: I buried my head in research journals, interviewed experts and scoured the Internet for information.
At the age of 22, I began to consider my own mortality. It had never occurred to me that, with all of the progress that has been made in cancer research, none of the standard treatments would work for me.
In the world of medicine, a trial refers to clinical research that follows a predefined plan or protocol. A clinical trial must comply with strict health, safety and ethical regulations determined by the Food and Drug Administration.
Being sick and young is hard in all the ways you might imagine and more, but mostly it can be incredibly boring.
Survivorship comes with unspoken pressures, responsibilities and challenges. After all, what is the point of saving a life if the life isn't a meaningful one?
To set a 100-day plan was to will myself into the future, no matter how uncertain it seemed.
It took me a long time to be able to say I was a cancer patient. Then, for a long time, I was only that: A cancer patient.
It is hard not to speak in cliches about cancer. It can be even harder not to feel as if I have to live up to those cliches. I sometimes feel a deep sense of guilt for not doing a better job of making lemonade out of metaphorical lemons.