Tatiana Schlossberg, the granddaughter of former president John F. Kennedy, says she has been diagnosed with a rare form of cancer.
Schlossberg, a journalist and author who writes about the environment, made her diagnosis public in an essay titled “A Battle with My Blood,” published on The New Yorker’s website on the 62nd anniversary of her grandfather’s assassination. She writes that after more than a year of treatment, she did not achieve a lasting remission and that the disease will kill her.
The 35-year-old is the daughter of Caroline Kennedy and Edwin Schlossberg. She is married and has two children. The cancer is acute myeloid leukemia (AML) with inversion 3, a rare mutation most often seen in older patients; Schlossberg learned of the diagnosis at 34.
“This is one of the ones that most of us who manage leukemia look at as probably one of the most aggressive mutations,” Dr. Clark Alsfeld, a hematology oncologist with Ochsner MD Anderson Cancer Center in New Orleans, says. He explains that it is very challenging to reach remission, long-term prognosis is short, and survival rates are lower than for other AML types.
Very little is known about what causes this form of AML or what raises the risk. Schlossberg writes that she had not felt sick and that the disease was discovered via blood tests the day she gave birth to her second child; she says she had swum a mile the day before. Alsfeld notes many acute leukemias likely develop and are detected over a relatively short period rather than lingering for years.
In her essay, Schlossberg describes the physical and emotional pain of the disease and the anguish of watching loved ones suffer alongside her. She also delivers a sharp rebuke of her first cousin once removed, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., calling him “mostly an embarrassment” to her and her immediate family. She criticizes his vaccine skepticism, lack of medical experience, and opposition to funding medical research, saying his positions made the health-care system she relied on feel “strained, shaky.”
Alsfeld says personal accounts like Schlossberg’s help put a human face on diagnoses such as acute myeloid leukemia and can deepen public understanding. He hopes the essay will spur renewed interest in supporting medical research, especially after federal research grants faced cuts this year.
