In April 2024, Maya was diagnosed with high risk Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL) b-cell type with a rare genetic mutation. Maya had just entered the “maintenance” phase in summer of 2025 when she relapsed. A lumbar puncture came back irregular and once again the Cayetano family was thrown right back into a new diagnosis with a lot more hospital stays.

It was determined that Maya would need a bone marrow transplant but a donor had to be identified first. Since the news of relapse, Maya has done one month of reinduction (more chemotherapy) to get her back into remission, 5 lumbar punctures, 3 bone marrow aspirations and 2 months of high dose methotrexate to keep her in remission until her donor was ready. Thankfully, although none of her sisters were a match, a 10/10 match was found for Maya through the registry!

On October 12, 2025 Maya was admitted to start pre conditioning for her transplant. She is going through 3 treatments of cranial radiation, 3 twice a day treatments of full body radiation and 4 days of chemo before getting her new cells on October 28th. From there, she will remain in the hospital until cleared to go home. We got to go home two weeks before Christmas and Maya has been doing great! We had twice weekly appointments that are now down to once a week appointments. Maya had a couple hiccups with some GVHD and testing positive for CMV. She no longer has the rash and her CMV is now negative. Since transplant she has had 2 bone marrow aspirations and 3 chimerisms checks. We had a small bump in both but we are still

Negative MRD and 100% donor cells after dropping to 92% for one chimerism check! 

We are so excited with how well Maya is doing and pray she continues to remain in remission with the least amount of side effects!