Caroline Kennedy’s daughter Tatiana Schlossberg revealed she was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia and told by doctors that she had a year left to live.
In an essay published by the New Yorker on Saturday, Schlossberg, 35, shared that doctors discovered the disease after she welcomed her second baby in May 2024.
“A few hours later, my doctor noticed that my blood count looked strange. A normal white-blood-cell count is around four to eleven thousand cells per microliter. Mine was a hundred and thirty-one thousand cells per microliter,” she wrote.
“It could just be something related to pregnancy and delivery, the doctor said, or it could be leukemia,” Schlossberg recalled, adding that doctors ultimately diagnosed her with “a rare mutation called Inversion 3.”
As for her treatment options, Schlossberg said she “could not be cured by a standard course.” Doctors recommended that she undergo months of chemotherapy treatment and a bone-marrow transplant.
“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.”
“I had a son whom I loved more than anything and a newborn I needed to take care of,” Schlossberg, who shares a 3-year-old son and 1-year-old daughter, with her husband George Moran, added.
After giving birth to her daughter, Schlossberg said she spent five weeks at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital and was later transferred to Memorial Sloan Kettering for a bone-marrow transplant procedure. For her chemotherapy, she began her treatments at home.
After months of treatment, she joined a clinical trial of CAR-T-cell therapy, a type of immunotherapy against certain blood cancers, in January. But, she was eventually told by doctors that her prognosis had worsened.
“George did everything for me that he possibly could. He talked to all the doctors and insurance people that I didn’t want to talk to; he slept on the floor of the hospital,” Schlossberg said of her husband, whom she married in 2017.
“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,” continued Schlossberg.
“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.”
“Mostly, I try to live and be with them now. But being in the present is harder than it sounds, so I let the memories come and go,” she closed.
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