Jon Batiste's Wife Suleika Jaouad Reveals She Needs Third Bone Marrow Transplant Amid Cancer Battle | Just Jared

Jon Batiste‘s wife Suleika Jaouad is sharing a new health update amid her cancer battle.

If you were unaware, the 38-year-old New York Times best-selling author and Emmy Award-winning journalist was first diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia when she was 22. She beat it once, then beat it again in 2022. Unfortunately, it came back a third time.

In a new update posted on Instagram on Monday (September 28), Suleika revealed that she needs a third bone marrow transplant, explaining that the treatments that previously kept her leukemia “at bay” were “no longer doing the trick.”

“I’ve known another bone marrow transplant might be in my future. I was hoping the future was less in a hurry,” Suleika wrote alongside a picture of herself in the hospital while hooked up to various IVs.

“I have brilliant doctors I trust with my life,” she added. “I have Jon, and my family, and the kind of friends who show up carrying games and flowers and inappropriate jokes. I have four dogs, two peacocks and fourteen chickens. I have a plan, and I have a great deal of hope.”

“I am also scared,” Suleika admitted. She also shared that she and her family are establishing the Suleika Jaouad Fund for Leukemia & Stem Cell Transplant Research at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. 

“The fund will support research led by my doctors Eytan Stein and Sergio Giralt, into more difficult-to-treat leukemias and more effective bone marrow transplants,” she announced.

“I’ve lived with leukemia for most of my adult life, long enough to watch the horizon of what is possible draw closer. I’ve benefitted from treatments that didn’t exist when I was first diagnosed, from protocols that once sounded experimental,” she wrote. “And once again, I find myself waiting for the science to catch up to where I am. I need another breakthrough.”

Suleika said that she hopes the research also helps herself, adding, “I want very badly to be here for a long time.”

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“But I also keep thinking about some person I don’t know, sitting in an exam room ten or twenty years from now, receiving terrible news followed by a sentence I’ve been lucky enough to hear more than once in the last sixteen years,” she added. There is something new we can try. What a beautiful sentence.”

“But I’m getting ahead of myself. Today, I’m still home. My suitcase lies half open on the floor, half-packed,” Suleika continued. “I’m following my dogs around the house and burying my face in their necks. Jon is here. The people I love are close enough to touch.”

Suleika said that she would giving more updates on her health journey in her “Isolation Journals” newsletter on Substack.

If you were unaware, Jon and Suleika have been married since 2022. You can find out more about their relationship and her health journey here.

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