Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

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This book is absolutely mind blowing, I finished reading it a week ago and my mind is still digesting it. An amazing memoir of severe illness and the trials and tribulations towards a journey of recovery. Am I a true believer in Jesus Christ and therefore a citizen of his kingdom, or am I an unbeliever and therefore an alien to his realm? She had many who were there for her as support throughout her long battle which altered her dreams, her relationships and her life goals. Cancer not only took a toll on her body, but on her outlook but also on those in her life. She mentions in the book that "Cancer is greedy." It ravaged everything and left her to rebuild again.

Between Two Kingdoms — Suleika Jaouad

Diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia at the age of twenty-two, Suleka’s story touches all the emotion buttons. Along with laser-sharp writing, thoughtful and insightful words, she journals her incredible journey living a precarious life with cancer and the impact on people within her orbit. Her courage, resilience and drive is inspirational. She eventually embarks on a 100-day road trip across the U.S. to visit several key individuals who supported her throughout the seemingly insurmountable trials and years of being a cancer patient. The first half read very much like my own journals from when I had cancer, which I consider rather amateurly written and self centered. Having cancer makes you obsessed about what's happening to you, so this was not surprising. Even so, I was not made to like her writing or her personality much until the traveling began. Both of those improved greatly in Part 2. That journey obviously cleansed her soul and she wrote about the experience with finesse. Do I keep the law of Jesus, both believing and obeying the gospel, or am I a lawless one deceived into disregard of his covenant law? The first part of the book where Suleika was fighting cancer, mostly in the hospital, was the most interesting and engaging to me. I guess you would call this the "1st kingdom" of the book. Suleika's brother essentially saved her life by providing his bone marrow. Even so, it would take time to know if the process was successful and there could be pitfalls along the way. Suleika would get disappointed when she found out that more chemotherapy treatments would be necessary after the bone marrow transplant to ensure the best odds of beating the cancer. She and Will took up residence in her parent's empty small apartment in the village where Will was her sole caregiver, even while working a full-time job. I found his dedication truly inspirational and could sympathise from personal experience with the strain such an arrangement causes.In the summer after graduating from college, Suleika Jaouad was preparing, as they say in commencement speeches, to enter “the real world.” She had fallen in love and moved to Paris to pursue her dream of becoming a war correspondent. The real world she found, however, would take her into a very different kind of conflict zone. Before Jaouad began her first aggressive round of chemo, and not finding much written about a young person’s experience with cancer, she decided to start a blog. When it unexpectedly went viral, she was able to turn the exposure into a series of columns for The New York Times ( Life, Interrupted), and in the years that followed — as she and Will set up home together in her mother’s apartment in the Village — Jaouad was able to help support them with further writing and speaking gigs (she incidentally notes that she won an Emmy for the video series that accompanied her columns; this really isn’t an ordinary life). You will never know how strong you are until being strong is the only choice you have. " - Bob Marley It started with an itch, like a thousand invisible mosquito bites. Next came the exhaustion, and the six-hour naps that only deepened her fatigue. Then a trip to the doctor and, a few weeks shy of her twenty-third birthday, a diagnosis: leukemia, with a 35 percent chance of survival. She would spend much of the next four years in a hospital bed, fighting for her life.

Between Two Kingdoms — Dead Good Reading Between Two Kingdoms — Dead Good Reading

Jaouad’s account of a younger person’s experience of cancer shows how the notion of an externally driven teachable moment falls short, as she very much is driven to transform herself and to reimagine her survival as a creative act. But the argument that cancer is seen as a “teachable moment”, both by patients as well as healthcare professionals is clearly present in Jaouad’s narrative. A beautiful, elegant and heart-breaking book that provides a glimpse into the kingdom of illness.' SIDDHARTHA MUKHERJEE, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies If you are depressed, you are living in the past. If you are anxious, you are living in the future. If you are at peace, you are living in the present.” It started with an itch—first on her feet, then up her legs, like a thousand invisible mosquito bites. Next came the exhaustion, and the six-hour naps that only deepened her fatigue. Then a trip to the doctor and, a few weeks shy of her twenty-third birthday, a diagnosis: leukemia, with a 35 percent chance of survival. Just like that, the life she had imagined for herself had gone up in flames. By the time Jaouad flew home to New York, she had lost her job, her apartment, and her independence. She would spend much of the next four years in a hospital bed, fighting for her life and chronicling the saga in a column for The New York Times. When the grief within is raw, it’s hard to open up to the possibility of a new life, new love, because it requires us to open ourselves to the possibility of new loss. Living with that openness means feeling pain, but the alternative is feeling nothing at all. And the truth is you can’t protect yourself from loss, be it a breakup, a betrayal, or something as big and blinding as death. Trying to evade heartbreak is how we miss out on our people, our purpose—and I can’t think of a better response to life’s hardships than love. 5. Our health isn’t binary.A work of breathtaking creativity and heart-stopping humanity.' ELIZABETH GILBERT, author of Eat Pray Love A propulsive, soulful story of mourning and gratitude - and an intimate portrait of one woman's sojourn in the wilderness between life and death.'

When Silver Linings Don’t Cut It, Honesty Helps - The New

Suleika’s career aspirations as a foreign correspondent were cut short when, at age 22, she was diagnosed with leukemia. She began writing her New York Times column “Life, Interrupted” from her hospital room at Sloan-Kettering, and has since become a fierce advocate for those living with illness and enduring life’s many other interruptions. Obviously, we know she survives and even thought her career goals changed, she continues to write and wrote an Emmy award winning column titled "Life Interrupted." Her wok has been featured in magazines and she has created Isolation Journals. She may not be a war correspondent, but she has made an impact in journalism.When our lives are dramatically disrupted by illness or a global pandemic or some other sorrow, it’s important that we create new habits, goals, routines, and rituals. Trying to apply old ones in such circumstances is a recipe for frustration. We have to reassess our days and what they can contain. We have all kinds of ceremonies and rites of passage that help us honor different phases of life and move from one to the next: birthdays, bar mitzvahs, weddings, baby showers, funerals. These are all ritual experiences that help us bridge the distance between “no longer” and “not yet”—but re-entry after a traumatic experience has no such clear ceremony. There are not too many people whose lives are untouched in some way by cancer. Not necessarily themselves but perhaps a work colleague, friend or family member. It's a torturous ordeal for the patient and stressful for loved ones. Suleika's story makes that blindingly obvious and highly relateable. The suffering is not only physical though that's dreadful enough. It's also pyschologically damaging, particularly when you're only 22 and continuously having near death experiences. Suleika speaks openly and eloquently about her sense of loss, her resentment and the envy she felt towards those still living their lives and moving forward. She writes of anger, of pain and of fear. She admits to huge bouts of guilt at the financial burden she placed upon her parents on one hand and the pressure upon her brother to become a bone marrow donor on the other. She made clear just how sad it was to make beautiful new friendships with other young cancer patients only to lose them and to then have to arrange their memorials. Each one of those factors made it hard to read Suleika's story. Post disease, not only was Suleika a new person in the sense of her changed DNA (thanks to her bone marrow transplant) but she needed to make a new life for herself, to figure out who she was now, what was important to her and how she could live within the physical limitations of her body. Instead of remaining mired in the difficulties of living, of dwelling on how life was not what she hoped and planned it to be, now that she had technically survived, Suleika forced herself to make some changes. In this spirit she embarked upon a 100 day roadtrip taking in 33 states meeting up with twenty of the people (strangers) whose words and thoughts helped sustain her during her cancer battle. This was inspiring and showed the true grit Suleika had demonstrated throughout her illness. The chart compares the dominions ofChrist and Satan under each of the seven criteria. It makes a very interesting and enlightening study. Why not open your Bible and read the passages given? 2 Questions you must ask yourself... She had spent the past 1,500 days in desperate pursuit of one goal—to survive. And now that she’d done so, she realized that she had no idea how to live.

Between Two Kingdoms : A Memoir of a Life Interrupted Between Two Kingdoms : A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

My family and I don’t talk about the time we spent in the hospital. It was deeply traumatic for them in ways that I will (hopefully) never understand, and I respect that. A consequence of this, however, is that I knew nothing about what I had until decided to write about it for my college application essay. I didn’t even know the name of the disease until I was 17. What I was left with was a swirl of memories and feelings that were processed in my 7-year-old brain and were left essentially untouched. That is, until I read this. The second half has a recovering Suleika making a 100-day trip around the U.S. to visit fellow sufferers, some old acquaintances, but most new. She was really brave (or naive) to do this with no one else but her adorable rescue mutt.VanDrunen, David (Autumn 2007), "The Two Kingdoms Doctrine and the Relationship of Church and State in the Early Reformed Tradition", Journal of Church and State, KC library, 49 (4): 743–63, doi: 10.1093/jcs/49.4.743 –via EBSCO (subscription required). You do not have to be a young adult battling cancer, a child of immigrants, a woman with incredible grit, to understand, empathize, or find meaning. Importantly, this resonance does not, as Jaouad writes, “reduc[e] your suffering to sameness.” EGGSHELLS I HADN’T BEEN single for longer than a month or two since the age of seventeen. I wasn’t proud of this, and I didn’t think it was healthy, but that was how it had been. For the bulk of my time in college, I was in a serious relationship with a brilliant British-Chinese comparative literature major. He was my first real boyfriend and he took me to fancy dinners in the city and on vacation to Waikiki Beach, but as the semesters passed I grew restless, wishing I’d had more experience prior to meeting him. The summer before senior year, that relationship ended when I had a fiery fling with a young Ethiopian filmmaker. After that, it was a Bostonian I met while doing research over winter break in Cairo; he had a flair for grand-scale pranks and activism and had just been arrested for dropping a thirty- foot Palestinian flag down the side of one of the pyramids. A week later, as we drank bootleg whiskey at a bar overlooking the Red Sea, he dialed up his parents. “Meet the girl I’m gonna marry,” he announced, passing the phone to me before I could protest. I broke up with him not long after. Around graduation I started seeing the Mexican-Texan aspiring screenwriter. We dated for two disastrous months in New York while I interned and he waited tables at a trendy downtown hotel. He got mean when he was drunk, and he was drunk most of the time. There was nothing casual about these relationships. When I was in them, I was fully in them, consumed by the idea of a life together. But even during the most intense periods, I was aware of an exit sign As a person with a chronic health condition, I understood her frustrations with the medical system, the ways in which they failed her—neglecting to tell her that chemo might leave her infertile, for example. As a reader, I was utterly drawn into her storytelling, which invites us to be braver and more imaginative than ever before without ever requiring us to “find the silver lining.” And as an aspiring 23yo writer, I loved reading how she, an unpublished 23yo, pitched and was granted a weekly column with The New York Times; Cancer had made me brazen, she writes. The accompanying video series that she proposed and filmed for this column went on to win an Emmy.