Tatiana Schlossberg, Granddaughter of JFK and Jackie Kennedy, Shares News of Terminal Cancer Diagnosis in Moving Essay [View all]

Source: Town and Country

Tatiana Schlossberg, an environmental journalist and author, and the granddaughter of Jackie and John F. Kennedy, is dying of cancer. She shared her terminal leukemia diagnosis in a moving essay titled "A Battle with My Blood," published in the New Yorker today.

"When I was diagnosed with leukemia, my first thought was that this couldn't be happening to me, to my family," she writes. She recounts how two years ago she was diagnosed with "acute myeloid leukemia, with a rare mutation called Inversion 3" shortly after giving birth to her second child, a daughter. She describes her doctors, and the nurses, and how her sister donated her stem cells. ("My brother was a half-match, but he still asked every doctor if maybe a half-match was better, just in case," she writes.) And she details the way her husband took care of her and their children: "He is perfect, and I feel so cheated and so sad that I don't get to keep living the wonderful life I had with this kind, funny, handsome genius I managed to find."

Throughout the beautifully written piece are unflinching descriptions of what happened to her body during her treatment as she went into remission and then relapsed. She also uses the essay to make her opinion perfectly clear about her cousin, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and his work as Secretary of Health and Human Services in the Trump administration.

"Meanwhile, during the CAR-T treatment, a method developed over many decades with millions of dollars of government funding, my cousin, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., was in the process of being nominated and confirmed as the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Throughout my treatment, he had been on the national stage: previously a Democrat, he was running for President as an Independent, but mostly as an embarrassment to me and the rest of my immediate family," she writes.



Read more: https://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/tradition/a69518231/tatiana-schlossberg-terminal-cancer-diagnosis-news/

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Here's a link to her full, heartbreaking essay.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/a-battle-with-my-blood

"When you are dying, at least in my limited experience, you start remembering everything. Images come in flashes—people and places and stray conversations—and refuse to stop. I see my best friend from elementary school as we make a mud pie in her back yard, top it with candles and a tiny American flag, and watch, in panic, as the flag catches fire. I see my college boyfriend, wearing boat shoes a few days after a record-breaking snowstorm, slipping and falling into a slush puddle. I want to break up with him, so I laugh until I can’t breathe.

"Maybe my brain is replaying my life now because I have a terminal diagnosis, and all these memories will be lost. Maybe it’s because I don’t have much time to make new ones, and some part of me is sifting through the sands.

"On May 25, 2024, my daughter was born at seven-oh-five in the morning, ten minutes after I arrived at Columbia-Presbyterian hospital, in New York. My husband, George, and I held her and stared at her and admired her newness. 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 microlitre. Mine was a hundred and thirty-one thousand cells per microlitre. It could just be something related to pregnancy and delivery, the doctor said, or it could be leukemia. “It’s not leukemia,” I told George. “What are they talking about?”

"George, who was then an urology resident at the hospital, began calling friends who were primary-care doctors and ob-gyns. Everyone thought it was something to do with the pregnancy or the delivery. After a few hours, my doctors thought it was leukemia. My parents, Caroline Kennedy and Edwin Schlossberg, had brought my two-year-old son to the hospital to meet his sister, but suddenly I was being moved to another floor. My daughter was carried off to the nursery. My son didn’t want to leave; he wanted to drive my hospital bed like a bus. I said goodbye to him and my parents and was wheeled away."