Vincent Serritella didn’t just beat a brain cancer that kills 19 of every 20 patients. He picked up a brush and painted portraits of the doctors and nurses who got him through it – 30 of them, one face at a time.
It started with flashing bright spots in the lower-left of his vision. Serritella, a former Pixar animator from the San Francisco Bay Area, wasn’t especially worried, but he wasn’t expecting open-brain surgery.
Scans at Sutter Health told a brutal story – stage 4 glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer only 5 to 7% of people survive. It spreads fast into healthy tissue, and the tumor a surgeon can see is rarely the whole of it.
He went through a brain resection, radiation and chemotherapy after being diagnosed in December. Against the odds, he is now cancer-free, with a second clean MRI on June 2.
In the middle of treatment, he started painting again – on his oncologist’s advice. Dr. Akanksha Sharma had urged him to lean into his creativity, telling him it helps build brain elasticity and may improve outcomes. Sharma had arrived at Sutter three years earlier, and Serritella credits her honesty as much as her care.
So he painted the people in the room with him. He has now finished 30 portraits of the doctors, nurses and caregivers who saw him through, among them surgeon Dr. Michael Zhang.
“100% I’m alive today because of them,” Serritella says in a video filmed by Sutter Health, which shows him at the easel surrounded by the finished faces.
For him, the brush was always going to be how he said thank you.
“Art is always something that’s been a constant since I was 5,” he said. “The highest form of gratitude from me is to let me paint your portrait.”
Each canvas is a likeness of someone who kept him alive – the care that carried him through the worst year of his life, hung where he can see all of it at once.
