Tatiana Schlossberg (35), the granddaughter of former US President John F. Kennedy, revealed on Saturday that she has myeloid leukemia.
Tatiana, an environmental journalist, made the shocking revelation about her terminal cancer in an essay – Battle of My Blood – in the New Yorker.
She said the condition was discovered after she gave birth to her daughter in May 2025, when a doctor noticed her blood count looked strange.
The doctor said it could just be something to do with the pregnancy and delivery, or it could be leukemia.
She told her husband what they talked about, that it was not leukemia. However, the diagnosis was acute myeloid leukemia with a rare mutation called Inversion 3.
JFK’s granddaughter also shared that during the last clinical trial, her doctor told her he could keep me alive for maybe a year.
“My first thought was that my children, whose faces are permanently on the inside of my eyelids, won’t remember me. My son may have a few memories, but he’ll probably confuse them with pictures he sees or stories he hears. I never really took care of my daughter – I couldn’t change her, bathe her or feed her, all because of the risk of infection after my transplant.”
She said every doctor she saw asked her if she had spent much time at Ground Zero, given how common blood cancers are among first responders.
“I was in New York on 9/11 in sixth grade, but I didn’t visit the site until years later. I’m not old—I just turned thirty-four,” she added.
“I couldn’t—she couldn’t believe she was talking about me. The day before, nine months pregnant, I swam a mile in the pool. I wasn’t sick. I didn’t feel it.”
Describing the shock of the diagnosis, she wrote: “I was actually one of the healthiest people I knew. I regularly ran five to ten miles in Central Park. I once swam three miles across the Hudson River—terrifyingly—to raise money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.”
Tatiana said she was to write a book about the oceans – about their destruction, but also about the possibilities they offer if they don’t get sick.
What is acute myeloid leukemia
According to the American Cancer Center, leukemias are cancers of the blood. They start in cells that would normally develop into different types of blood cells. Most often, leukemia starts in the early forms of white blood cells, but some leukemias start in other types of blood cells.
Acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is a rare cancer that affects your bone marrow and blood. It is an aggressive cancer that, if left untreated, can be life-threatening. AML usually affects people age 60 and older, but it can affect younger adults and children, Clevelandclinic.org says
