Conno Christou tracks his sleep with a Whoop band and checks nearly 100 biomarkers every year. At 35, he was monitoring his health as closely as anyone he knew. His last checkup in 2025 showed no issues. Then, after a workout, his arm swelled.
A missed appointment
A week passed before he saw a doctor. The specialist found two blood clots in his veins and scheduled surgery. Pre-op exams changed everything. A doctor walked back into the room and told him the procedure was not happening.
“We see an 11-by-11-by-8 centimeter mass behind your sternum,” the doctor said.
A biopsy confirmed what Christou had never contemplated. He had an aggressive, fast-growing form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. This rare diagnosis affects roughly one in 420,000 people. The cause is a random genetic mutation with no link to lifestyle, diet, or stress. The tumor had existed for about three months. In three more weeks, it would have reached stage four.
“Lucky in my unluckiness,” Christou told this editor this week from his home in Athens, where he lives part time. “It was only found because I went in for something else entirely.”
Seeking a second opinion
Christou’s first oncologist, a renowned specialist, recommended the lighter of two available chemotherapy regimens. Christou booked his first infusion three days out. Then, the night before, he sought a second opinion.
That second doctor did not hesitate. He recommended the harder regimen — continuous in-hospital infusion, cycling every three weeks across six months — citing Christou’s specific pathology. The lighter treatment carried roughly a 60% success rate for his presentation. The aggressive one brought that number to around 85%. Two world-class doctors offered diametrically opposite recommendations.
“As founders, we hold the wheel,” Christou says of the propensity of many people to accept what they are told — and why more should not. “You hear many things. You don’t have to follow the first advice.”
He did not just follow the advice of the second physician. Over the next two days, he gathered 12 opinions in total — drawing on his professional network, reaching out to hematologists and oncologists in the US and abroad, calling in every favor he could. Eleven to one voted in favor of the harder path. He took it. The decision, he says, did not feel brave so much as logical. He was already a data-driven person, and now the stakes felt existential to him.
Treating the body like a startup
Over six months of treatment, Christou approached chemotherapy the way he approached building a company, as a marathon of sprints — each of them with a finite cycle and each week filled with data points. He had done a mandatory 25-month military service in Cyprus at age 18 and he borrowed from that experience, too. He was going to be a good soldier, he told himself. Trust the process. Six cycles. Get through it.
He wore his Whoop throughout, and found it remarkably accurate at predicting the days his immune system would bottom out, sometimes flagging them before symptoms arrived. He kept a symptom journal using voice transcription, logging every shift, every side effect, every medication and counter-medication. He narrowed his focus to three variables: sleep, nutrition, and, first and foremost, psychology. (“It moves the needle more than anything,” said Christou. “I never asked ‘why me’ — not once. That question has no useful answer.”)
He fed all of it — blood results, scan data, wearable output, journal entries — into Claude. He is far from alone in turning to chatbots for medical guidance. A public opinion poll released in March found that a third of American adults now use them for health information and advice. The stories accumulating online suggest that for some patients, AI is delivering what the system could not.
Experts urge caution; Danielle Bitterman, clinical lead for data science and AI at Mass General Brigham, has told the New York Times in recent months that general-purpose chatbots are frequently wrong and “have not been thoroughly evaluated” for personalized diagnoses.
Christou does not disagree. “It didn’t replace the doctors,” he says, but it “helped me ask the right questions.”
For a condition as rare as his — one an oncologist might see once a year — access to a model that had absorbed the full body of medical literature was, he says, simply not the same as a Google search.
Avoiding unnecessary radiation
The model proved critical at the end of treatment. His final PET scan — the imaging used to detect active disease — came back ambiguous. His oncologist began discussing a second line of therapy, potentially radiotherapy, near his heart and lungs. It was an alarming development.
Christou again did his homework. He read that for this specific lymphoma, the false-positive rate on end-of-treatment PET scans is around 60% — a statistic that still astonishes him. “It’s 2026,” he says. “Sixty percent.”
He fed all three of his PET scans and his MRI into Claude, which flagged a known but easily overlooked phenomenon: in patients under 40 recovering from this type of lymphoma, the thymus gland can reactivate after chemotherapy, showing up on imaging as what appears to be active disease. Given his age, his specific scan characteristics, the model put the probability of that explanation at roughly 90%.
He sought three more opinions. The fourth doctor confirmed it: thymus rebound. There was no active disease. No radiotherapy was needed. He was clear.
What it means
Christou is still unfolding what the last year has meant, for his health, how he works, and how he thinks about time. He built Keragon, his current company, before any of this happened; it is an AI-powered platform that helps medical practices automate their administrative operations.
But going through the system as a patient has given him new perspective. He watched nurses and doctors buried under tasks that had nothing to do with care. He received the same chemotherapy protocol as an 80-year-old woman, the side effects managed through a cascading chain of additional drugs, each causing problems of their own. He says he is certain that we will look back at this era of treatment and cringe.
He takes Sundays off now, mostly. He tries to be present — at lunch with friends, at home with his dog, in conversations that might once have felt like a distraction from work. A VC friend told him something years ago that he said he kept replaying during treatment: Be happy now. He says it is among the hardest things to do and yet he finally appreciates its importance.
He says he would be happy to talk to anyone going through something similar to share notes, compare experiences. He seems to mean it.
“It’s not happening in 10 years,” he says of what AI can already do for patients willing to use it. “It’s happening today.”
