Jon Batiste Reveals Wife Suleika Jaouad’s Cancer Is in Remission: ‘Best-Case Scenario’

She’s able to continue to paint, continue to write,” Jon confirmed. “All this is happening after this crazy recurrence, and it’s just the best-case scenario. She’s feeling healthy. The treatment is working and we’re very inspired.”

Jaouad was originally diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia in 2010 and given a slim chance of survival, but she defied the odds by going into remission. The author wrote about her first cancer battle in her 2021 memoir Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted, which became a New York Times Bestseller.After a recurrence of the disease in 2021, Jaouad underwent her second bone marrow transplant. Unfortunately, she confirmed last September that doctors found “a very small amount of leukemia in [her] marrow.”

“In the last month, I’ve been taking things day-by-day — really, hour-by-hour, given how the side effects of chemo come and go,” she wrote via her blog in September 2024. “Living that way sometimes takes on a white-knuckling-it feeling, like you’re doing everything you can to muscle through. For respite from that grind and from the ongoingness of illness, I’ve turned to something that, exactly two years ago, we began practicing as a community: noticing and cultivating small joys.”