Tatiana Schlossberg, granddaughter of former US President John F. Kennedy, has revealed she has less than a year to live after a diagnosis of terminal blood cancer.
Just hours after giving birth to her daughter last year, she was diagnosed with myeloid leukaemia, a type of blood cancer, she says.
The environmental journalist wrote about her treatment in the New Yorker magazine on the 62nd anniversary of JFK’s assassination.
She says she was diagnosed in May 2024 after her doctor noticed her ‘strange’ white blood cell count in the hospital.
Her doctor told her that he can keep her ‘alive for a year, maybe’ during the latest clinical trial.
She wrote: ‘My first thought was that my kids, whose faces live permanently on the inside of my eyelids, wouldn’t remember me.
‘My son might have a few memories, but he’ll probably start confusing them with pictures he sees or stories he hears.
‘I didn’t ever really get to take care of my daughter—I couldn’t change her diaper or give her a bath or feed her, all because of the risk of infection after my transplants.
‘I was gone for almost half of her first year of life. I don’t know who, really, she thinks I am, and whether she will feel or remember, when I am gone, that I am her mother.’
Who is Tatiana Schlossberg?
Tatiana is the daughter of former US ambassador Caroline Kennedy, 67, and Edwin Schlossberg, 80.
She has two siblings – a younger brother, Jack Schlossberg, who recently announced his bid for Congress, and an elder sister, Rose Kennedy Schlossberg.
Tatiana graduated from Yale and also received a master’s degree in US history from the University of Oxford.
She is a climate change and environmental journalist and the author of ‘Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don’t Know You Have’.
After working for multiple publications, including The New York Times and The Record, she now works freelance.
Tatiana also blasted her uncle, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, who is US Secretary of Health and Human Services, for his skepticism of vaccines and more, in the New Yorker article.
She wrote: ‘Bobby is a known skeptic of vaccines, and I was especially concerned that I wouldn’t be able to get mine again, leaving me to spend the rest of my life immunocompromised, along with millions of cancer survivors, small children, and the elderly.
‘Bobby has said, “There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective.” Bobby probably doesn’t remember the millions of people who were paralyzed or killed by polio before the vaccine was available.’
Tatiana’s dad, who grew up in New York City in the 1940s and 50s, remembers when vaccines became available – he described the feeling of freedom to her.
She also writes about how she witnessed her uncle ‘cut nearly a half billion dollars for research into mRNA vaccines’ and slashing ‘billions in funding from the National Institutes of Health, the world’s largest sponsor of medical research.’
She said: ‘I worried about funding for leukemia and bone-marrow research at Memorial Sloan Kettering. I worried about the trials that were my only shot at remission.
‘Early in my illness, when I had the postpartum hemorrhage, I was given a dose of misoprostol to help stop the bleeding. This drug is part of medication abortion, which, at Bobby’s urging, is currently “under review” by the Food and Drug Administration.
‘I freeze when I think about what would have happened if it had not been immediately available to me and to millions of other women who need it to save their lives or to get the care they deserve.’
What is myeloid leukaemia?
Myeloid leukemia is a type of blood cancer that originates from young white blood cells, specifically granulocytes or monocytes, in the bone marrow.
Adults and children can get it, but it is most often diagnosed in older people.
Symptoms are caused by too many abnormal white blood cells and not enough normal white cells, red cells and platelets.
These symptoms include: feeling weak or tired, a high temperature, bruising and bleeding easily, breathlessness, weight loss and more.
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