New Yorker Journalist Reflects on her Birkie Experience upon a Leukemia Diagnosis

From New Yorker Instagram Post:

On May 25, 2024, Tatiana Schlossberg gave birth to her daughter. A few hours later, her doctor noticed that her blood count looked strange. The diagnosis was acute myeloid leukemia, with a rare mutation called Inversion 3. “I wasn’t sick. I didn’t feel sick. I was actually one of the healthiest people I knew,” the environmental journalist, and daughter of Caroline Kennedy, writes. “I had a son whom I loved more than anything and a newborn I needed to take care of. This could not possibly be my life.” During her latest clinical trial, Schlossberg’s doctor had told her that he could keep her alive for a year, maybe. “My first thought was that my kids, whose faces live permanently on the inside of my eyelids, wouldn’t remember me,” she writes.

From New Yorker Article A Battle with my Blood by Tatiana Schlossberg :

“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. I regularly ran five to ten miles in Central Park. I once swam three miles across the Hudson River—eerily, to raise money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. I work as an environmental journalist, and for one article I skied the Birkebeiner, a fifty-kilometre cross-country race in Wisconsin, which took me seven and a half hours.”

New Yorker Instagram Post (continued):

As she spent more of her life under the care of doctors, nurses, and researchers, she watched her cousin Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., cut federal funding for medical treatment and research. “Suddenly, the health-care system on which I relied felt strained, shaky,” Schlossberg writes. Read the full story at the link below.

Posted December 12, 2025 at 8:04 am