Tatiana Schlossberg, a journalist and environmental author and the granddaughter of President John F. Kennedy, has revealed she was diagnosed with a rare, terminal form of blood cancer.
She published the diagnosis in an essay titled “A Battle with My Blood” on The New Yorker website, posted on the 62nd anniversary of her grandfather’s assassination. In the essay, Schlossberg says she has fought the disease for more than a year but that treatments did not produce a lasting remission and that the illness will ultimately be fatal.
Schlossberg, 35, is the daughter of Caroline Kennedy and Edwin Schlossberg. She is married and has two children. Her diagnosis is acute myeloid leukemia (AML), specifically AML with inversion 3, a rare mutation typically seen in older patients; she learned of it when she was 34.
Dr. Clark Alsfeld, a hematology-oncologist at Ochsner MD Anderson Cancer Center in New Orleans who treats leukemias and performs stem cell transplants, described the inversion 3 subtype as particularly aggressive. “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,” he said. “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 noted that little is known about what causes this AML subtype or what increases risk for it. Schlossberg writes that she did not notice symptoms and that the cancer was found on the day she gave birth to her second child, during routine blood tests; she says she had swum a mile the day before. Alsfeld added that many leukemias may develop over a relatively short period 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 her essay, Schlossberg describes the physical and emotional toll of the disease and the pain of seeing loved ones struggle alongside her. She also used the piece to criticize her first cousin once removed, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., calling his public behavior “mostly an embarrassment” to her immediate family. She expressed concern about his vaccine skepticism, lack of medical experience, and opposition to funding for medical research, saying those stances made the health-care system she depended on feel “strained, shaky.”
Alsfeld said personal accounts like Schlossberg’s can make a difficult diagnosis more real for the public and hopes the essay will renew interest in medical research funding after federal grant cuts earlier this year. Her story has drawn attention both to this uncommon AML subtype and to broader issues around research, treatment access and the emotional effects of a terminal diagnosis.