Quotes from Suleika Jaouad

But no conversation between doctor and patient can magically turn an uninsured patient into an insured one. Doctors are just as helpless as patients when it comes to solving the problems of the uninsured.

I remember my first day of chemo as if it were yesterday, hanging up my favorite summer dress like an athlete retiring a jersey. Within a few weeks, my waist had shrunk to a double zero - the size it was when I was in the sixth grade. My cheek bones jutting out. Rings under my eyes. Skin the color of chalk.

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.

Being in your twenties and trying to figure out who you are and what you want to do in life - with or without cancer - is a scary endeavor on its own.

Even the word 'cancer' is ugly, scary, burdensome - a roadblock for a conversation before it even starts. Who wants to go there? Much of the time, I'd rather not bring it up if I don't have to - and I'm the one with the disease!

To set a 100-day plan was to will myself into the future, no matter how uncertain it seemed.

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 get along well with my medical team and I have a tremendous amount of respect for them. But the idea of discussing my finances during a doctor's appointment makes me uncomfortable.

I was born in New York City speaking French at home.

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.

In my darkest days in the oncology unit, I promised myself that if I ever got into remission one day, I would become a stronger, healthier and better version of my precancer self.

Cancer had given me a reverse celebrity status: all the attention for something you didn't want to be known for. I had crossed over into a new land, the land of Patient. And with every step I was feeling less like Suleika.

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?

When I finally returned home after my five-week hospitalization, I could feel the stares of strangers on my bald head and thinning eyebrows. Everywhere I went, cancer spoke for me before I could say the first word.

Looking back, I call the first month after my diagnosis 'the cancer bubble' because I wasn't showing obvious signs of my disease. I looked about the same - maybe a little more tired and pale than usual, but a stranger could never have guessed that I carried a secret, deep in my bones.

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.

Cancer has made me mentally and spiritually stronger. But as my life starts to go back to normal, I find that some of my old, bad habits are still lurking in the shadows.

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.

I joke that I was basically born and raised in airports. I feel most at home at JFK.

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.

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.

My mother comes from a small village on the Lac de Neuchatel where there is one bakery, one butcher and one grocery store. Even after decades in New York, she prefers home cooking to ordering in.