When Aanya was 6, she sat down to think about her wish and drew a picture of three mountains: Everest, Whitney, and K2. Her mom, Ramya, thinks the artwork was inspired by a photograph of her and Aanya’s dad, Pavan, climbing Mount Whitney before Aanya was born. 

Her parents had learned years earlier that Aanya qualified for a wish. Just two weeks before her second birthday, she was diagnosed with leukemia and underwent a three-year treatment process at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford. 

“You’re in an existential fight, and you don’t know how it’s all going to end up,” Ramya says. “Between questions for the doctors, the chemotherapy, making sure she ate and was hydrated, there wasn’t a lot of time to think about the wish,” adds Pavan. 

They decided to wait until Aanya was a bit older and would be able to have more of a say in her wish. “We knew it would be a very special thing for her,” says Pavan. 

Pavan describes the first year of Aanya’s treatment as “super intense” and the second as having “ebbs and flows.” By the third year, he says, things had become “relatively event‑free and unspectacular, which is a good thing in this world. That’s when we started talking about the wish.” 

Seeing a big mountain was just the beginning of Aanya’s vision. “Her uncle Rakesh lives in Europe and told her about the Northern Lights,” says Ramya. “And she really likes salmon, she loves salmon. So, she wanted to go somewhere with mountains, glaciers, the Northern Lights, salmon—everything that she thought was cool, right? So, that’s how we ended up with Alaska.”

Her parents hoped Aanya would get a chance to experience more of the world she’d been missing out on. “After that kind of journey, where you’ve been living in the hospital for so long, we wanted to get her connected back to nature,” Pavan says. 

And so, in June 2025, Aanya, her younger brother Aavyan, and her parents boarded a Delta flight to explore Alaska. From the very start, it felt different. “The entire plane clapped for her because the pilot announced it,” Ramya remembers. “They let her sit in the pilot’s chair, and she got to pull the yoke. It was a great start to the trip, you felt taken care of, and you felt like somebody saw you.” 

The moment also set the tone for a trip where, for the first time in a long time, Aanya was in control. “Whatever she wanted is what we did,” says Ramya. “And there’s so much joy in that. Just seeing our child thrive and sort of strut around saying, ‘I planned this, this is my wish, let me explore’ was a healing gift that we didn’t realize we needed.” 

Aanya took them on a train to Spencer Glacier, whose mile-high peaks tower over pristine Spencer Lake. “We walked up to it—and this was amazing—the glacier comes all the way down,” Pavan says. On a boat tour with glacier views, Aanya was thrilled to see a big chunk of ice break off the glacier and crash into the water.  

She brought the family dog sledding, albeit without the sled. “In the summertime, they have the sled dogs pull a carriage on wheels,” Pavan says. And Aanya led her family to a wildlife preserve, where injured and orphaned animals are given a second chance. When asked which animals she remembers most, Aanya confidently replies, “Black bear, brown bear, muskox.” She especially loved watching the antics of the muskoxen, who would headbutt a car tire, then circle back to hit it again.

While Aanya loved the adventures, some of the most meaningful moments were the simplest. 

“It’s interesting, we go all the way there, and these two kids found so much joy in a little playground,” Pavan says. “That’s all they needed. I think they needed us as a family to be there.” 

After years focused on appointments and treatments, it was a reminder of something they hadn’t realized they were missing—time together, just as a family. And it helped them all reconnect with the world. 

“There’s almost a rupture in time when you go through something like this,” Pavan explains. “The world you knew before doesn’t exist in the same way.” 

Pavan adds that the wish trip even helped the family reconnect with the people in their lives who weren’t sure what to say after Aanya’s diagnosis. “It can be hard to find common ground,” he says. “What Make-A-Wish did for us is a celebratory, easy-to-talk-about journey, saying, ‘Hey, we’re going on a wish trip. This is what happened, this is what we did, and Aanya loved it.’” 

Both Pavan and Ramya say they’re committed to helping spread the word about the impact of wishes. “Letting the child lead and plan things, so the children feel in control—especially in a time when the family and the child have no control over what’s happening—I think that’s amazing.” Ramya says. 

Today, Aanya is a happy second-grader with close friends and a life filled with activities like drawing, dance performances, and swimming. (She recently got her eighth ribbon for mastering the breaststroke.) 

Meanwhile, Pavan and Ramya are brainstorming ways to support both Make-A-Wish Greater Bay Area and pediatric cancer care. Pavan says: “As we pursue this journey of ours, we want to figure out how to include Make-A-Wish as a part of it.”