{"id":48654,"date":"2025-11-22T16:22:14","date_gmt":"2025-11-22T16:22:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/48654\/"},"modified":"2025-11-22T16:22:14","modified_gmt":"2025-11-22T16:22:14","slug":"a-battle-with-my-blood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/48654\/","title":{"rendered":"A Battle with My Blood"},"content":{"rendered":"

Suddenly, the health-care system on which I relied felt strained, shaky. Doctors and scientists at Columbia, including George, didn\u2019t know if they would be able to continue their research, or even have jobs. (Columbia was one of the Trump Administration\u2019s first targets<\/a> in its crusade against alleged antisemitism on campuses; in May, the university laid off a hundred and eighty researchers after federal-funding cuts.) If George changed jobs, we didn\u2019t know if we\u2019d be able to get insurance, now that I had a pre\u00ebxisting condition. Bobby is a known skeptic of vaccines<\/a>, and I was especially concerned that I wouldn\u2019t be able to get mine again, leaving me to spend the rest of my life immunocompromised, along with millions of cancer survivors, small children, and the elderly. Bobby has said, \u201cThere\u2019s no vaccine that is safe and effective.\u201d Bobby probably doesn\u2019t remember the millions of people who were paralyzed or killed by polio before the vaccine was available. My dad, who grew up in New York City in the nineteen-forties and fifties, does remember. Recently, I asked him what it was like when he got the vaccine. He said that it felt like freedom.<\/p>\n

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; slashed billions in funding from the National Institutes of Health<\/a>, the world\u2019s largest sponsor of medical research; and threatened to oust the panel of medical experts charged with recommending preventive cancer screenings. Hundreds of N.I.H. grants and clinical trials were cancelled, affecting thousands of patients. I worried about funding for leukemia and bone-marrow research at Memorial Sloan Kettering. I worried about the trials that were my only shot at remission. Early in my illness, when I had the postpartum hemorrhage, I was given a dose of misoprostol to help stop the bleeding. This drug is part of medication abortion<\/a>, which, at Bobby\u2019s urging, is currently \u201cunder review\u201d by the Food and Drug Administration. I freeze when I think about what would have happened if it had not been immediately available to me and to millions of other women who need it to save their lives or to get the care they deserve.<\/p>\n

My plan, had I not gotten sick, was to write a book about the oceans\u2014their destruction, but also the possibilities they offer. During treatment, I learned that one of my chemotherapy drugs, cytarabine, owes its existence to an ocean animal: a sponge that lives in the Caribbean Sea, Tectitethya crypta. This discovery was made by scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, who first synthesized the drug in 1959, and who almost certainly relied on government funding, the very thing that Bobby has already cut.<\/p>\n

I won\u2019t write about cytarabine. I won\u2019t find out if we were able to harness the power of the oceans, or if we let them boil and turn into a garbage dump. My son knows that I am a writer and that I write about our planet. Since I\u2019ve been sick, I remind him a lot, so that he will know that I was not just a sick person.<\/p>\n

When I look at him, I try to fill my brain with memories. How many more times can I watch the video of him trying to say \u201cAnna Karenina\u201d? What about when I told him I didn\u2019t want ice cream from the ice-cream truck, and he hugged me, patted me on the back, and said, \u201cI hear you, buddy, I hear you\u201d? I think about the first time I came home from the hospital. He walked into my bathroom, looked at me, and said, \u201cIt\u2019s so nice to meet you in here.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s my daughter, her curly red hair like a flame, squinting her eyes and grinning a gap-toothed grin after taking a sip of seltzer. She stomps around the house in bright-yellow rain boots, pretending to talk on my mother\u2019s phone, a string of fake pearls around her neck, no pants, giggling and running away from anyone who tries to catch her. She asks us to play James Brown\u2019s \u201cI Got the Feelin\u2019\u00a0\u201d by picking up a portable speaker and saying, \u201cBaby, baby.\u201d<\/p>\n

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. So many of them are from my childhood that I feel as if I\u2019m watching myself and my kids grow up at the same time. Sometimes I trick myself into thinking I\u2019ll remember this forever, I\u2019ll remember this when I\u2019m dead. Obviously, I won\u2019t. But since I don\u2019t know what death is like and there\u2019s no one to tell me what comes after it, I\u2019ll keep pretending. I will keep trying to remember.\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n

\"Tatiana<\/p>\n

Tatiana Schlossberg at her parents\u2019 home in New York City.Photograph by Thea Traff for The New Yorker<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Suddenly, the health-care system on which I relied felt strained, shaky. Doctors and scientists at Columbia, including George,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":48655,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[13483,22013,5567,27453,9,11,10],"class_list":{"0":"post-48654","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-cancer","9":"tag-health-and-human-services","10":"tag-health-care","11":"tag-leukemia","12":"tag-new-york","13":"tag-new-york-headlines","14":"tag-new-york-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48654","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48654"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48654\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48655"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48654"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48654"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48654"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}