In a heartbreaking personal essay for The New Yorker, Tatiana Schlossberg, Caroline Kennedy’s daughter and John F. Kennedy’s granddaughter, revealed she’s been battling acute myeloid leukemia, a rare cancer of the bone marrow and blood.
In the essay, titled, “A Battle With My Blood,” Schlossberg recounts how she was diagnosed following the birth of her daughter, when her doctor noticed her white blood cell count looked off. “The diagnosis,” she explains, “was acute myeloid leukemia, with a rare mutation called Inversion 3. It was mostly seen in older patients.”
Schlossberg was initially told she would need at least a few months of chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant, followed by more chemotherapy to stop the cancer from coming back.
“I did not — could not — believe that they were talking about me,” the environmental journalist writes in The New Yorker. “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 spent five weeks at Columbia-Presbyterian and did a round of chemotherapy at home before the transplant. In January, she joined a clinical trial of CAR-T-cell therapy, a type of immunotherapy that’s approved for certain blood cancers. Unfortunately, the cancer came back.
Schlossberg remarks that the very treatments she relied on were threatened by her cousin Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s policies and funding cuts.
“As I spent more and more of my life under the care of doctors, nurses, and researchers striving to improve the lives of others, I watched as Bobby cut nearly a half billion dollars for research into mRNA vaccines, technology that could be used against certain cancers; slashed billions in funding from the National Institutes of Health, the world’s largest sponsor of medical research; and threatened to oust the panel of medical experts charged with recommending preventive cancer screenings.”
As a result of the cuts, she worried about N.I.H. grants and clinical trials being canceled, “affecting thousands of patients” as well as ” funding for leukemia and bone-marrow research at Memorial Sloan Kettering. I worried about the trials that were my only shot at remission.” She also mentions that one of her chemotherapy drugs, cytarabine, was discovered by scientists at UC Berkeley who “almost certainly relied on government funding, the very thing that Bobby has already cut.”
She was also distressed by Kennedy’s attacks on vaccines, since her cancer treatment wiped out her immune system, requiring her to get her childhood vaccinations a second time. “I was especially concerned that I wouldn’t be able to get mine again, leaving me to spend the rest of my life immunocompromised, along with millions of cancer survivors, small children, and the elderly.”
Schlossberg’s cancer is incurable — and she’s been spending her time with her family. “But being in the present is harder than it sounds, so I let the memories come and go,” she writes. “So many of them are from my childhood that I feel as if I’m watching myself and my kids grow up at the same time.”
