John F Kennedy’s granddaughter Tatiana Schlossberg has revealed she has been told she has less than a year to live after being diagnosed with an aggressive and incurable form of blood cancer. Tatiana, 35, an environmental journalist and the daughter of former US ambassador Caroline Kennedy, said she learned she had myeloid leukaemia just hours after giving birth to her daughter in May 2024. Writing in the New Yorker on the 62nd anniversary of her grandfather’s assassination, she said the devastating diagnosis came after doctors noticed a “strange” white blood cell count while she was still in hospital. The Mirror reports that her doctor has since warned her that the latest treatment available can keep her “alive for a year, maybe”. “My first thought was that my kids. wouldn’t remember me,” she wrote. “I didn’t ever really get to take care of my daughter. I was gone for almost half of her first year of life. I don’t know who, really, she thinks I am.” Tatiana said she had no symptoms and believed she was “one of the healthiest people I knew”, having swum a mile in the pool the day before she gave birth. But further tests uncovered a rare genetic mutation, Inversion 3, which cannot be treated with standard therapies. Since then, she has endured two bone-marrow transplants, chemotherapy and blood transfusions. At the start of this year, she entered a clinical trial for CAR-T-cell therapy a cutting-edge immunotherapy used for some blood cancers but has now been told the treatment will not save her. The diagnosis has left her grieving for the future she expected with her young family, and she wrote of feeling guilty for adding “a new tragedy” to her mother’s life. Tatiana also criticised her second cousin, Robert F Kennedy Jr, now the US Secretary of Health and Human Services, accusing him of gutting medical research funding and spreading vaccine scepticism. She called him “an embarrassment to me and the rest of my immediate family” and said his actions had put vital cancer research at risk. Her heartbreaking diagnosis has reignited discussion of the so-called “Kennedy Curse”, a phrase often used to describe the family’s long history of loss and tragedy. Tatiana’s grandfather, President John F Kennedy, was assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Two days later, accused killer Lee Harvey Oswald was himself shot dead on live television by nightclub owner Jack Ruby. Jacqueline Kennedy, still wearing her blood-stained pink suit, watched Lyndon B Johnson sworn in on Air Force One hours after her husband’s death. Five years later, Caroline’s uncle Senator Robert Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles after winning key presidential primaries. Photographer images of 17-year-old busboy Juan Romero comforting him on the kitchen floor became some of the most haunting pictures of the era. His killer, Sirhan Sirhan, remains in prison. The tragedies continued in later decades. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis died of non-Hodgkin lymphoma in 1994. In 1999, Tatiana’s uncle John F Kennedy Jr, his wife Carolyn Bessette and her sister Lauren died when his plane crashed into the Atlantic Ocean near Martha’s Vineyard. In 2012, Mary Kennedy ex-wife of Robert F Kennedy Jr died after years of struggles with addiction. The family also endured the hidden suffering of Rosemary Kennedy, sister to JFK, who was left permanently disabled after a disastrous lobotomy arranged by her father. She lived the rest of her life in care until her death in 2005.
https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/uk-world-news/jfks-granddaughter-less-year-live-36292562
JFK’s granddaughter has less than a year to live after shock cancer diagnosis
