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, “A Battle with My Blood,” published on The New Yorker website on Saturday, the 62nd anniversary of her grandfather’s assassination. In the essay, she says that despite fighting the disease for over a year, her treatments did not result in a lasting remission and that the disease will kill her.
Schlossberg is the daughter of Caroline Kennedy and Edwin Schlossberg. She is 35 years old, married, and has two children. The cancer is acute myeloid leukemia (AML). The form she has is AML with inversion 3, a rare mutation most commonly seen in older patients; Schlossberg learned of her diagnosis at 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 and is 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.”
Very little is known about what causes this AML subtype or what increases risk, Alsfeld says. Schlossberg writes that she did not feel sick and that 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. Alsfeld notes that many leukemias likely do not exist for long before detection: “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.”
In the essay, Schlossberg describes the physical and emotional pain of the disease and the anguish of seeing loved ones suffer alongside her. She also uses the piece to criticize her first cousin once removed, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. She calls his public behavior “mostly an embarrassment” to her immediate family and expresses concern about his vaccine skepticism, lack of medical experience, and opposition to funding for medical research, saying it made the health-care system she relied on feel “strained, shaky.”
Alsfeld says personal stories like Schlossberg’s can help people grasp the reality of a diagnosis that might otherwise seem abstract. He hopes the article spurs renewed interest in funding for medical research, after federal research grant cuts this year.