Maria Shriver praised her “extraordinary” cousin Tatiana Schlossberg after the latter announced her acute myeloid leukemia diagnosis.
The journalist took to Instagram Saturday to share Schlossberg’s essay for the New Yorker, in which she revealed she was given a year to live after giving birth to her second child last year.
“If you can only read one thing today, please make take the time for this extraordinary piece of writing by my cousin [Caroline Kennedy’s] extraordinary daughter Tatiana,” she wrote.
“Tatiana is a beautiful writer, journalist, wife, mother, daughter, sister, and friend,” Shriver, 70, added. “This piece is about what she has been going through for the last year and a half.
“It’s an ode to all the doctors and nurses who toil on the frontlines of humanity. It’s so many things, but best to read it yourself, and be blown away by one woman’s life story.”
The former First Lady of California, who was previously married to Arnold Schwarzenegger, urged readers “to be grateful for the life [they] are living today, right now, this very minute.”
Schlossberg’s heartbreaking essay detailed how doctors noticed her “blood count looked strange” after she welcomed her daughter — whose name has yet to be revealed — in May 2024.
“A normal white-blood-cell count is around four to eleven thousand cells per microliter,” she stated. “Mine was a hundred and thirty-one thousand cells per microliter.”
The journalist, 35, recalled the doctor saying the blood test result could either be related to her pregnancy, “or it could be leukemia.”
“I did not — could not — believe that they were talking about me,” Schlossberg wrote. “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 shared that medical professionals recommended a bone-marrow transplant and chemotherapy.
But after months of treatment, the writer was told her condition had worsened.
Schlossberg noted that one of her first thoughts was for her and her husband George Moran’s newborn daughter and 3-year-old son.
She shared that Moran had done “everything” that “he possibly could” by communicating with doctors and sleeping on hospital room floors to be with her.
She also credited her parents, Kennedy and Edwin Schlossberg, as well as her siblings — sister Rose and brother Jack — for stepping in and helping to raise their two kids for the past year and a half while she received treatment.
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