The granddaughter of President John Kennedy shared that she has terminal cancer and that she may have about another year left.
Tatiana Schlossberg, daughter of Caroline Kennedy, shared in an essay for The New Yorker that she was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia with a rare mutation, The Associated Press reported.
The mutation happens in less than 2% of AML cases, CNN reported.
The diagnosis came after the birth of her second child, when doctors noticed she had a high white blood cell count.
She said she felt fine the day before giving birth.
“I did not — could not — believe that they were talking about me,” Schlossberg explained. “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.”
The condition is typically seen in older people. She was 34 years old when she got her diagnosis. She said she had several rounds of chemotherapy and received two stem cell transplants, the AP reported.
Schlossberg also developed a type of Epstein-Barr virus earlier this year that damaged her kidneys. She also had to learn to walk again.
Her doctor for the latest clinical trial said, “he could keep me alive for a year, maybe,” she shared.
Schlossberg, who is a cousin of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., said his changes to the agency will affect her treatments.
“As I spent more and more of my life under the care of doctors, nurses, and researchers striving to improve the lives of others, I watched as Bobby cut nearly a half billion dollars for research into mRNA vaccines, technology that could be used against certain cancers,” she wrote.
She said doctors at New York-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center didn’t know if cuts made by the current administration would affect hers and others’ treatments, CNN reported
“Suddenly, the health-care system on which I relied felt strained, shaky,” Schlossberg wrote.
Funding to Columbia University was restored after a deal was reached with the White House.
Schlossberg’s essay was published on the 62nd anniversary of her grandfather’s assassination, the AP reported.
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