Jon Batiste Wins Grammy Announces Secret Marriage to Cancer Fighter
- Jon Batiste, who won “Album of the Year” at the Grammys revealed that he and his partner, Suleika Jaouad who is fighting cancer were married in secret earlier this year.
- Jaouad is battling leukemia for a second time; she chronicled her first bout with cancer in her bestselling memoir, Between Two Kingdoms.
- The author and partner of Jon Batiste had a bone marrow transplant and is undergoing chemotherapy to treat her cancer.
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Jon Batiste reflects on this life together in the interview. He says, “It was in February [that we got married]. Okay this [cancer] has happened, but this isn’t gonna interrupt the plan that we had. We have a plan. We’re moving towards a plan, and this [cancer diagnosis] is just a bump in the road.
“Focus on the light. Hold on to the light.” – Jon Batiste
He continues, saying, “It’s an act of defiance. The darkness will try to overtake you but just turn on the light; focus on the light. Hold on to the light.”
Jon Batiste’s Partner Suleika Jaouad’s Cancer Battle
Jon Batiste’s wife, Jaouad, first battled leukemia in her early 20s, and again today in her early 30s.
Dr. Nina Shah, a SurvivorNet adviser and hematologist at the University of California San Francisco, explains in an earlier interview how to best understand leukemia. "One cell got really selfish and decided that it needed to take up all the resources of everybody else, and in doing so, took up space and energy from the rest of the body," Dr. Shah says.
"In general having a blood cancer means that your bone marrow is not functioning correctly," she explains. "And when your bone marrow doesn't function correctly it means that you can have something happen to you like anemia. Or you can have low platelets, which makes it possible for you to bleed easily. Or your immune system is not functioning correctly."
Speaking with Vogue magazine in an interview earlier this year, Joaud said of her cancer, "I, today, am actually doing well. I believe I'm on day plus-32 post transplant and I've been out of the hospital for almost exactly a week," she tells the magazine. She says she learned her illness was back in November of last year.
She says, "It's so incredibly rare, I think less than 1% of patients, according to my doctor, relapse 10 years after a bone marrow transplant. When my oncologist called me, she was in tears. Not just my world, but my partner's world and my family's world completely imploded. We had a weekend to pack up all of our things, to find temporary homes for our dogs, to find a borrowed apartment in New York City and for me to begin chemo."
What is a Blood Cancer How is it Different?
What is a Bone Marrow Transplant?
The Between Two Kingdoms author, Jaouad, had a bone marrow transplant for treatment, as she mentions in her interview with CBS when speaking about her marriage to partner Jon Batiste. A bone marrow transplant is a treatment used for some cancers, like leukemia. It replaces bone marrow with healthy cells; it is also called a "stem cell transplant."
In a previous interview, Dr. Caitlin Costello, a hematologist-oncologist at UC San Diego Health, says, "The things we consider for patients who may need an autologous stem cell transplant is number one their disease."
Dr. Costello explained that a stem cell transplant is more effective for certain diseases. "There are some diseases for whom this works better than others," she said. "It's most commonly used in relapsed diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, but there are other lymphomas, mantle cell lymphoma for whom which patients oftentimes get and I'll autologous stem cell transplant as soon as they achieve remission. Or something close to it."
Is a Stem Cell Transplant Right for You?
Learn more about SurvivorNet's rigorous medical review process.