Tatiana Schlossberg shared in an essay that she is facing terminal cancer, and it came soon after she gave birth to her second child. She said she had been feeling fine which made the news even harder to understand at first.
She explained that a doctor noticed something strange in her blood work, and it turned out her white blood cell count was extremely high. The doctor said: “A normal white-blood-cell count is around four to eleven thousand cells per microliter. Mine was a hundred and thirty-one thousand cells per microliter.”
She said the doctor told her it might be related to the pregnancy, but it also could be leukemia with a rare mutation. She learned that her type of leukemia could not really be cured with the standard treatments people sometimes hear about.
She wrote that doctors told her she would need months of chemotherapy and then a bone marrow transplant if she wanted more time. She said: “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 wasnt sick. I didnt feel sick. I was actually one of the healthiest people I knew.”
She talked about how overwhelming it all became because she had a toddler at home and a newborn who needed constant attention. She and her husband George Moran have a three year old son and a one year old daughter so life was already busy before all of this.
She said after the birth she spent weeks in one hospital and then went to another one for the transplant procedure. She kept doing chemotherapy at home and then she entered a clinical trial for a treatment that uses immune cells which helped her for a while but her doctor later said she probably had only a year to live.
She also wrote about how much support her husband gave her and how he stayed with her through every part of it. She said: “George did everything for me that he possibly could. He talked to all the doctors and insurance people that I didn’t want to talk to he slept on the floor of the hospital.”
She said she had always tried to be a good daughter and someone who didn’t cause extra pain for her mother. She said: “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 added that now she feels she has brought new sadness into her family’s life, and she cannot stop it, which has been hard for her to accept. She said: “Mostly I try to live and be with them now. But being in the present is harder than it sounds so I let the memories come and go.”
