Reading Between the Lines of My Latest Scan

November 13, 2025

Photo by Jan Canty on Unsplash

This isn’t the post I wanted to write.

I had planned to share something very different today: a hopeful update about my upcoming stem cell transplant. I wanted to tell you about my incredible donor, the science behind the process, and the clinical study I enrolled in to help advance future treatments for graft-versus-host disease. It was meant to be a post about progress and about moving into the next chapter.

However, today’s PET scan changed that.

The transplant is on pause for now. The scan showed that one spot on the right side of my neck has become more active since the last scan. My doctors are studying it closely to determine what is happening there. The part that is more concerning is the appearance of two new lesions on my spleen, which look suspicious for lymphoma activity .

The good news, and something I am holding onto tightly, is that the tumor in my abdomen has continued to respond to treatment. Progress and setback can exist side by side. Sometimes healing takes the shape of both at once.

For now, we wait while my doctors review everything and develop a new plan. One option being discussed involves targeting a protein called CD19 using CAR-T cell therapy. It is a treatment that reprograms a patient’s own immune cells to recognize and attack cancer cells. In simple terms, it retrains the body’s defenders to finally see and destroy what has been hiding in plain sight.

Before all of this began, before the scan, the pause, and the swirl of new decisions, last week gave me something I did not know I needed: time with family.

My sister Tara came to stay, giving Maria a few days to go home, catch up on work, and recharge. Tara filled the week with laughter and food, her signature Thai soul food, the kind that makes your kitchen smell like warmth and memory. She dragged me on walks around the city, turned hospital errands into small adventures, and even made sure we stopped by a few TV and movie landmarks along the Upper East Side after appointments.

Gabriel and Annie came early in the week, and Ethan arrived later. It was a gift to have two of my children here, to talk about life beyond hospitals and medicine. Annie is wonderful, thoughtful, and grounded, and I can see why Gabriel lights up when she is around. Watching them together was its own quiet kind of healing.

That week reminded me of something I often forget: before I was a husband, a father, or a boss, I was a brother. It is a role that feels both foundational and timeless. Siblings have known us the longest. They have seen every version of who we are, the awkward, the angry, the ambitious, and they loved us anyway. I am proud of my sisters and brother. Proud of who they are, what they have built, and how they continue to show up when it matters most. They inspire me more than they probably realize.

As we enter whatever this next chapter becomes, I carry all of that with me: love, laughter, science, faith, and a quiet hope that this time, destruction truly gives way to rebirth.

Hope does not disappear when the plan changes; it simply learns to take a new direction.