Quotes from Suleika Jaouad

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.

Well, writing for me had always been my first love and what I leaned on as a way to kind of endure difficult passages.

Ever since a therapy dog visited me in the hospital during my first cycle of chemotherapy in May 2011, I became fixated on the idea of having a dog of my own one day.

When I was first in the hospital, some of my visitors seemed so intent on not upsetting me that they avoided the topic of cancer altogether. Others just couldn't seem to find any words.

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!

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.

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.

Whether we're too embarrassed or shy - or worried that a discussion about cost might affect the quality of our care - it's clear that both doctors and patients need to do more communicating.

There are days when I even long for the paralegal job that once upon a time made me so miserable. It wasn't the perfect fit for me but it was satisfying to go to sleep each night after a hard day's work at the office.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

For cancer patients like me, and for others who suffer from chronic or life-threatening illnesses, natural disasters don't put health on the back burner.

Isolated in the oncology ward, I began to think about my dream to become a writer.

Sex can be a squeamish subject even when cancer isn't part of the picture, so the combination of sex and cancer together can feel impossible to talk about.

Getting healthy means listening to my body - and no longer comparing myself with other people at the gym. Getting healthy means being satisfied with small, sustainable, incremental changes to my diet and lifestyle.

I can always tell when my mother, an artist who grew up in Switzerland, starts to feel nostalgic for home. It is the smell of the crispy apple tarts, the ginger cookies, and the creamy muesli full of nuts and fresh berries. The scent alone delivers a rush of childhood memories for me.

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.

In Paris, the doctors had struggled to make sense of my symptoms - anemia, fatigue and persistent infections. They ran test after test - I was even hospitalized for a week - but the results were inconclusive.

Cancer makes people think about mortality. It scares your friends and family. And many cancer patients, consciously or otherwise, try to buffer bad news with a dose of positivity.

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.

Cancer can catch even the best of us off guard. Sometimes the emotions come pouring out. Sometimes they stay locked inside.