Jon Batiste and Suleika Jaouad’s latest update is a small glimpse of love in the middle of a very difficult stretch.
In a joint Instagram post shared Oct. 25, the couple cuddled up for two hospital selfies. In one photo, Jaouad, wrapped in a blanket, rested her chin on her husband’s shoulder; in another, she kissed his cheek. “The kids doing alright today, and still madly in love,” they wrote.
The post comes nearly a month after The New York Times best-selling author and journalist announced that she needs a third bone marrow transplant. Treatments that had been keeping her leukemia “at bay,” she explained, were “no longer doing the trick.”
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‘I Have a Great Deal of Hope’
Jaouad shared the news via Instagram on Sept. 28. “I’ve known another bone marrow transplant might be in my future. I was hoping the future was less in a hurry,” she wrote.
Jaouad’s leukemia diagnosis came at 22, just as she was starting her life after college. Now 38, she’s already undergone two bone marrow transplants.
“I have brilliant doctors I trust with my life,” she wrote in the accompanying Substack post. “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.” Then she added, “I am also scared.”
Looking for Another Breakthrough
Jaouad has been open about how much medical research has already changed her treatment options.
“I’ve lived with leukemia for most of my adult life, long enough to watch the horizon of what is possible draw closer,” she wrote. Some treatments she’s received didn’t exist when she was first diagnosed, while others once sounded experimental.
She and her family are also raising money to establish the Suleika Jaouad Fund for Leukemia & Stem Cell Transplant Research at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. The fund will support work led by her doctors, Eytan Stein and Sergio Giralt, on difficult-to-treat leukemias and more effective bone marrow transplants.
Although their latest photo doesn’t offer a medical update, it does show how she and Batiste, who married in 2022, are spending this time together. For now, they’re making time for a kiss and a little humor in a hospital room — and we’re wishing them more moments like this as treatment continues.
