Caroline Kennedy and Edwin Schlossberg’s daughter, Tatiana Schlossberg, has shared that she has terminal cancer. The 35-year-old revealed she was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia in an essay published by The New Yorker on November 22.
Tatiana explained that she learned about her illness after her doctor detected an abnormal white blood cell count following the birth of her second child in May 2024. “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 penned.
She continued: “‘It could just be something related to pregnancy and delivery,’ the doctor said, ‘or it could be leukemia.'” Tatiana was later diagnosed with “a rare mutation called Inversion 3”.
John F. Kennedy’s granddaughter went on to write about the treatment options available to her. “I could not be cured by a standard course,” she shared. Tatiana explained that she was told she would need months of chemotherapy and a bone-marrow transplant. “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,” she said.
© Getty Images“I had a son whom I loved more than anything and a newborn I needed to take care of,” she added. Tatiana and husband, George Moran, tied the knot in 2017 and share a 3-year-old son and 1-year-old daughter.
Tatiana spent five weeks at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital after giving birth to her daughter. She was later transferred to Memorial Sloan Kettering for a bone marrow transplant and continued her treatment at home with chemotherapy. In January, she began participating in a clinical trial for CAR-T-cell therapy, an immunotherapy designed to target specific blood cancers. However, her doctor told her that she had about a year to live.
© NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via“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 wrote. “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. 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.”
She continued: “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. 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. 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.”
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