NEED TO KNOW
Tatiana Schlossberg has terminal cancer.
The 35-year-old daughter of Caroline Kennedy and Edwin Schlossberg revealed in an essay published by The New Yorker on Saturday, Nov. 22, that she has been diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia.
Schlossberg said that she learned she had the disease after giving birth to her second baby in May 2024, after her doctor noticed an imbalance in her white blood cell count.
“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 microliter. Mine was a hundred and thirty-one thousand cells per microliter,” she wrote.
“It could just be something related to pregnancy and delivery, the doctor said, or it could be leukemia,” she further recalled, adding that she was eventually diagnosed with “a rare mutation called Inversion 3.”
Fairchild Archive/Penske Media via Getty
Writing about her treatment options, Schlossberg said, “I could not be cured by a standard course.”
Adding that she was initially told she would need months of chemotherapy and a bone-marrow transplant, she continued, “I did not — could not — believe that they were talking about me. 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.”
“I had a son whom I loved more than anything and a newborn I needed to take care of,” Schlossberg then said. (She and husband George Moran, who tied the knot in 2017, share a 3-year-old son and 1-year-old daughter.)
Schlossberg eventually spent five weeks at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital after giving birth to her daughter. She was then transferred to Memorial Sloan Kettering for a bone-marrow transplant, and she underwent chemotherapy at home.
Craig Barritt/Getty
In January, Schlossberg joined a clinical trial of CAR-T-cell therapy, a type of immunotherapy against certain blood cancers. She was eventually told by her doctor that she had a year left to live.
Schlossberg praised her husband for his support throughout the ordeal in her essay. “George did everything for me that he possibly could. He talked to all the doctors and insurance people that I didn’t want to talk to; he slept on the floor of the hospital,” she said.
“My parents and my brother and sister, too, have been raising my children and sitting in my various hospital rooms almost every day for the last year and a half,” continued Schlossberg. “They have held my hand unflinchingly while I have suffered, trying not to show their pain and sadness in order to protect me from it. This has been a great gift, even though I feel their pain every day.”
“For my whole life, I have tried to be good, to be a good student and a good sister and a good daughter, and to protect my mother and never make her upset or angry,” she added. (Schlossberg’s siblings include sister Rose Schlossberg and brother Jack Schlossberg.)
“Now I have added a new tragedy to her life, to our family’s life, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it,” said the mom of two.
As for her own family, Schlossberg wrote, “Mostly, I try to live and be with them now. But being in the present is harder than it sounds, so I let the memories come and go.”
