'Year to live': John F Kennedy's granddaughter diagnosed with terminal cancer aged 35

Tatiana Schlossberg, the granddaughter of the late president John F Kennedy, has revealed that she has been diagnosed with a rare form of cancer.

Writing a piece in The New Yorker on the 62nd anniversary of her grandfather's assassination, the 35-year-old shared she was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia in May 2024.

Acute myeloid leukaemia is the name given to a number of leukaemias that develop in the myeloid cell line in the bone marrow, according to the Leukaemia Foundation.

It is characterised by an "overproduction of immature white blood cells, called myeloblasts or leukaemic blasts. These cells crowd the bone marrow, preventing it from making normal blood cells.

"They can also spill out into the bloodstream and circulate around the body. Due to their immaturity they are unable to function properly to prevent or fight infection," says the foundation.

This was the case for Schlossberg, whose doctors only found the disease through routine blood tests just after she gave birth to her second child.

She was told her white blood cell count was highly elevated, with the normal white-blood-cell count being around four to eleven thousand cells per microliter, while hers was one hundred and thirty-one thousand cells per microliter.

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The journalist's cancer includes a mutation known as Inversion 3 which cannot not be cured by a standard course of treatment.

Schlossberg was shell-shocked by the diagnosis, since she had not felt any symptoms.

"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 wrote.

The author spent five weeks at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital after giving birth, later being transferred to Memorial Sloan Kettering hospital for a bone-marrow transplant.

After that, she underwent chemotherapy at home before joining a clinical trial of CAR-T-cell therapy (a type of immunotherapy against certain blood cancers) in January.

Despite all her efforts, she was eventually told she only had a year left to live.

The daughter of Caroline Kennedy and Edwin Schlossberg, the cancer patient lamented the effect of her diagnosis on her mother and their famous family.

"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 penned.

"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."

Her diagnosis is the latest in a long list of misfortunes to plague the Kennedy family.

After the famous assassination of her grandfather JFK in 1963, his younger brother RFK was also assassinated in 1968.

A year later, their younger brother Ted drove his car off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island, Massachusetts, killing his passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne.

Schlossberg's uncle JFK Jr died in a tragic plane crash in 1999 along with his wife Carolyn Bessette, and there are many more incidents that make up the "Kennedy curse".

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Schlossberg credited her family with helping her through the trying times, with her husband George Moran, a physician, talking to other doctors and insurance people on her behalf. Together they share son Edwin, born 2022, and their daughter, born May 2024.

Her famous family also helped out, including her parents and siblings, Jack and Rose.

"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," she wrote.

"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."

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