OpenCV whole Images to bytes without Saving to Disk

Question

Basically, I want to add a few bytes to my new PNG image file. An example case is like the following code:

img = open("example.png", "rb") # Open images and read as binnary
hex = img.read().hex() # Read images as Bytes to Hexadecimal.
add_hex = hex+"7feab1e74a4bdb755cca" # Add some bytes to it (as hex)
to_bytes_img = bytes.fromhex(add_hex) # Convert hex to bytes
with open("example2.png", "wb") as f: # Write images
   f.write(to_bytes_img)

But, the problem is, I have a special case that requires me to perform the above operation using OpenCV (CV2). Where cv2.imread() only reads and stores Pixels as a numpy array (an array of pixels, not the whole file).

Then, I want to write that image into a new file cv2.imwrite(), which will rebuild the image and save the PNG on disk. My question is, how do I add some bytes to the PNG image file (in buffer/memory), before the cv2.imwrite() operation.

I could probably do it with with open() as above, but that would be very inefficient opening, writing, opening, writing to disk again.