The strain on her immediate family she relied on her brother as her transplant match, her father for ensuring adequate research into her treatments and medical trials, and the insurance paperwork to cover it all, and her mother, falling back into the role of caring for her vulnerable daughter’s every need. The change in relationship with her partner to one of a patient and carer. Released in 2021, her book Between Two Kingdoms, Suleika conveys the realities of illness, highlighting an incredible amount of unseen emotional turmoil that occurs when illness or injury strikes a person and the flow-on effect to their whole life and the people around them. Here, she stayed connected to a vital part of herself – writing – and found a community of people who were also experiencing the same things when illness or injury had interrupted their lives and security. While undergoing treatment for leukaemia, she created a blog post to share her experiences and musings about life with illness from her hospital bed, which then transformed into the New York Times column ‘Life, Interrupted’.
Like many people who are affected by illness or injury Suleika took comfort in words and art. How do we find ourselves after being in survival mode for so long? Who even are we after a life changing experience? How do we re-enter the world? It raised more questions than answers when I started to resurface into a hybrid of my medical and ‘normal’ world. It changed the way that people viewed me and spoke to me.
I lost my health, independence, and the security in my life before I had even realised what had happened. I recognised her experience from my own experience. I was first introduced to Suleika Jaouad back in 2019 when her TED Talk ‘What almost dying taught me about living’ first aired and took the breath out of me. This book did a good job of breaking my heart, and piecing it back together with gold glue.Īs someone who has also had their life interrupted by unexpected medical conditions, Between Two Kingdoms was a book that I delayed reading until I was ready, and it took a bit to work up to being brave enough to read, but it was worth trying as I knew it was an important story to read and to share on the Lady in The Lighthouse blog. “Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.” – Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms “Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick,” Susan Sontag wrote in Illness as Metaphor. (Trigger warning: cancer, death, illness, grief, The book contains graphic medical content and speaks about grief surrounding suicide.)
0 kommentar(er)
