As she loses one young, brilliant friend after another to cancer, others rush to cushion their deaths - but Jaouad casts away neat endings, capturing their raging will to live. She works through the shame and disorientation of sexual health no one informed her that infertility and menopause were side effects of her treatment. Jaouad serves us scenes of her weary red-eyed father, fights with her partner so vicious they scare the dog, and exposes the aching silence left by those who fail to show up. It is harder to accept that we’re hurtling toward the unknown, changing in unsettling and permanent ways. It is common instinct to insist that we can remain in place, intact, even as the world as we know it dissolves. But she maintains that this will be temporary: “Initially, I’d clung to the hope of a short sojourn, one in which I wouldn’t have to unpack my bags.” She sounds out her diagnosis, observing, “It sounded like an exotic flower, beautiful and poisonous.” When she learns that, in addition to chemo, she’ll need a bone-marrow transplant, she writes, “Up until this point, the extent of my knowledge about bone marrow came from French cuisine - boeuf à la moelle, the fancy dish occasionally served with a side of toasted baguette.” She is hit by the cold, brutal newness of the world of illness, where handshaking is now forbidden, masks and gloves required of everyone who comes near. Finally, Jaouad receives a harrowing diagnosis: acute myeloid leukemia.
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