Tatiana Schlossberg is pictured at her book signing in 2019 in Richmond, Calif. Schlossberg says she has a rare form of cancer.
Amber De Vos/Getty Images for Goop
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Amber De Vos/Getty Images for Goop
Tatiana Schlossberg, the granddaughter of former president John F. Kennedy, says she has been diagnosed with a rare form of cancer.
Schlossberg is a journalist and author who writes about the environment.
She made her diagnosis public in an essay, called “A Battle with My Blood,” that was published on the website of The New Yorker on Saturday, the 62nd anniversary of her grandfather’s assassination.
In the article, Schlossberg reveals that despite fighting the disease for over a year, her treatments did not result in a lasting remission and says the disease will kill her.
Schlossberg is the daughter of Caroline Kennedy and Edwin Schlossberg. She is 35 years old and is married and has two children. Here’s what to know about the cancer, called acute myeloid leukemia, and what else Schlossberg says in the essay.
What is the disease?
Acute myeloid leukemia is a blood cancer. The form Schlossberg has been diagnosed with is known as acute myeloid leukemia with inversion 3, a rare mutation which is most commonly seen in older patients. Schlossberg learned of her diagnosis at just 34.
“I would say acute myeloid leukemia with inversion 3 is one of the ones that most of us who manage leukemia look at as probably one of the most aggressive mutations,” says Dr. Clark Alsfeld, a hematology oncologist with Ochsner MD Anderson Cancer Center in New Orleans, who specializes in leukemias and other myeloid malignancies. He’s also an expert in stem cell transplantation, which was part of Schlossberg’s treatment.
“It’s very, very challenging to get to remission, long-term prognosis is unfortunately very short, and survival rates are much less than we see with other types of acute myeloid leukemia,” Alsfeld says.
Very little is known about what causes the disease or what might increase someone’s risk of getting it, according to Alsfeld. Schlossberg writes that she didn’t feel sick and the disease was discovered via blood tests on the day she gave birth to her second child. She had swum a mile in the pool the day before, she says.
“The challenge that we have with acute myeloid leukemia, patients ask all the time, ‘how long did this exist?'” before it was detected, he says. “I usually tell them probably not very long. A lot of these leukemias that we have, we don’t think of as something that are lingering for years and years and years before they’re developed or before they’re detected.”
Schlossberg’s rebuke of RFK Jr.
In the essay, Schlossberg also writes about the physical and emotional pain brought about from the disease, and the anguish of seeing her loved ones share in that pain.
But the essay is not only personal. Schlossberg also offers a stinging indictment of her first cousin once removed, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
“Throughout my treatment, he had been on the national stage: previously a Democrat, he was running for President as an Independent,” Schlossberg writes. “But mostly as an embarrassment to me and the rest of my immediate family.”
She describes Kennedy’s history of vaccine skepticism, inexperience in the medical field, and antipathy for the funding of medical research as her gravest areas of concern.
“Suddenly, the health-care system on which I relied felt strained, shaky,” she writes.
Alsfeld says stories like Schlossberg’s can make a difference.
“Pieces like this are so incredibly important to help bring it home for a lot of people that might hear ‘acute myeloid leukemia’ and just think of a commercial on TV or something and not really be able to make it as heartfelt as that article was, and make it very real for people,” he says.
Alsfeld hopes the article spurs renewed interest in funding for medical research, after the Trump administration moved to cut federal research grants this year.
