Adam Richard Spector

Our son Adam was born on September 15, 1981, and he was competitive from the very beginning. As a little boy he was always working his mind on some game.

He was valedictorian of his high school class. At Penn he earned two degrees, one in communications and one in finance from Wharton, where he graduated at the top of his class. Then he went to work as an analyst in JPMorgan’s private bank. He had a plan, and he was working it.

It started in the fall of 2003 with discomfort in his chest. The doctors thought it was his heart, then Crohn’s disease. On July 21, 2004, my birthday, a scan finally showed what it was: Hodgkin’s lymphoma. He was twenty-two.

Adam went at the disease the way he went at everything. He studied it. The first chemotherapy worked for a few months, then the cancer came back. Stronger chemotherapy, a stem cell transplant, radiation. It came back again. Adam was sure it had never really left, that it was just too small for the scans to see. He was right.

In November 2005 his doctor gave him three choices: palliative care, another transplant, or a clinical trial. Then he said, “Adam, we all have to die sometime.”

Adam was twenty-four, and he had worked so hard to set himself up for the future. He told the doctor he was not going to die. Then he found the trial himself, at the National Institutes of Health.

For three months it worked. The cancer shrank by 82 percent, and we had hope. Then, in May 2006, the scans showed it growing again, now at stage 4. We went home with very little hope.

He kept going. A second transplant, and a fever of 106 that he came through. In September the cancer came back, this time in his lungs. He found one more trial, at City of Hope in California: a pill he thought would be easy. He said it felt like food poisoning twenty-four hours a day. Through all of it he kept smiling, and people could not believe it. He stayed on that trial until his body could not take any more.

In March 2007 Adam left home for the last time. By then he knew he was dying, and he worried about all of us.

His younger brother, Andy, was finishing college. He remembers the trip home:

“A week before he died, I was walking across campus to catch the bus. Students were stretched out on the lawn, and a frisbee kept floating across the quad like nothing in the world was wrong. I was going home to say goodbye to my best friend.”

While Andy was on that bus, Adam was telling us there was not enough research for patients like him, the ones whose Hodgkin’s keeps coming back. He wanted us to start a fund.

He died a week later, on April 11, 2007, with his family around him. He was twenty-five. We started the fund at Memorial Sloan Kettering that year, and in 2010 it became the Adam R. Spector Foundation.

Adam spent his life building a future. When he knew it would not include him, he wanted others to have the future he could not.

Lynn Spector, Adam’s mother