Tatiana Schlossberg, the granddaughter of the late president John F Kennedy, has revealed that she has been diagnosed with acute myeloid leukaemia – a rare form of cancer.
The cancer affects the myeloid cell line in the bone marrow, preventing it from making normal blood cells, according to the Leukaemia Foundation. This means that the blood cells are unable to function properly, and therefore can’t prevent or fight infection.
The 35-year-old revealed her diagnosis in a written piece for The New Yorker on the 62nd anniversary of her grandfather’s assassination.
She revealed that she found out in May 2024, after doctors found the disease following routine blood tests, shortly after she gave birth to her second child.
Schlossberg was told her white blood cell count was highly elevated, with the normal white-blood-cell count being around four to eleven thousand cells per microliter, while hers was one hundred and thirty-one thousand cells per microliter.
Her diagnosis includes a mutation known as Inversion 3, which cannot be cured by standard treatments.
“I did not – could not – believe that they were talking about me. I had swum a mile in the pool the day before, nine months pregnant. I wasn’t sick. I didn’t feel sick. I was actually one of the healthiest people I knew,” she wrote.
She spent five weeks at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital following the birth of her second child, before being transferred to Memorial Sloan Kettering hospital for a bone-marrow transplant.
Schlossberg underwent chemotherapy at home before joining a clinical trial of CAR-T-cell therapy in January, but despite all her efforts, she was told she only had one year left to live.
“For my whole life, I have tried to be good, to be a good student and a good sister and a good daughter, and to protect my mother and never make her upset or angry,” she wrote.
“Now I have added a new tragedy to her life, to our family’s life, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.”
Her recent diagnosis comes amid a long history of tragedies that have affected the Kennedy family, including the assassinations of JFK and her great-uncle RFK, the Chappaquiddick crash, and the 1999 plane accident that killed her uncle JFK Jr and his wife.
Schlossberg said she has been supported closely by her husband, George Moran, as well as her parents and siblings, Jack and Rose.
“My parents and my brother and sister, too, have been raising my children and sitting in my various hospital rooms almost every day for the last year and a half,” she wrote.
“They have held my hand unflinchingly while I have suffered, trying not to show their pain and sadness in order to protect me from it.
“This has been a great gift, even though I feel their pain every day.”
Image: Instagram
