Angels Watching Over You
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 5:The First Cycle
The port went in three days after staging, a small surgical procedure to place a catheter under the skin of Cissy’s chest so that six months of chemotherapy wouldn’t have to be fought through a fresh needle every single time. Dr. Li explained it to Cissy herself, crouched at the bed rail, in words scaled down without being talked down to.
“It’s like a little door,” she said, “right here under your skin.” She touched two fingers to the spot, just below Cissy’s collarbone. “Once it’s in, the medicine goes through the door instead of through a new needle in your arm every time. You’ll still feel a little poke when we use it, but nothing like what you’ve had this week.”
“Does Liam have to leave for this one too?” Cissy asked, which had become, Étaín noticed, the first question attached to every new procedure now, ahead of pain, ahead of fear.
“This one, yes,” Dr. Li confirmed gently. “It’s a real surgery, small as it is. But it’s quick, and Walt tells me you two have a system for the waiting part now.”
“We do,” Liam said, with the flat confidence of a boy who considered the system entirely settled. “He gives me the coloring stuff and I tell him what I feel, and he writes it down, and the second she’s done I get to go back in.”
“That’s exactly right,” Walt announced, appearing in the doorway as if summoned by the mention of himself. “Same deal as last time, champ.”
The surgery took forty minutes. Liam spent the first twenty quietly coloring and the last twenty with his hand pressed flat to his own chest, just below the collarbone, in the same spot Dr. Li had touched on Cissy.
“It’s not hurting her,” he told Walt, before Walt had even asked. “It’s just — a pulling feeling. Right here. Like a zipper.”
“A zipper,” Walt repeated, writing it down with the same care he gave every other word out of Liam’s mouth by now.
“Yeah. Not the kind that hurts. Just the kind you feel happening.”
The port was in and healing within the hour. The following morning, before the first bag of chemotherapy was even hung, Dr. Li came by to do something she made a point of doing herself rather than delegating — sitting both children down together and explaining, in plain terms, exactly what the next few days were likely to bring.
“I want you both to know what’s coming,” she said, “so none of it surprises you. The medicine going in today is strong. It’s going to make some of Cissy’s cells feel sick along with the bad ones, because right now the medicine can’t always tell the difference.”
“Which cells,” Liam asked, the way he asked most things now — not to be difficult, but because he genuinely wanted the real answer rather than the soft one.
“Her stomach lining, for one — that’s the nausea. Her hair follicles, which is why her hair is very likely going to fall out over the next couple of weeks. Her bone marrow too, for a while, which means her body won’t fight off germs as well as it usually does, so we’ll be careful about that.”
Cissy’s hand had found Liam’s without either of them seeming to notice. “Is it going to hurt?”
“Some of it will feel bad. Tired, sick to your stomach, sore in your mouth sometimes. I won’t tell you none of it’s unpleasant, because that wouldn’t be true. But it’s not going to hurt the way a broken bone hurts. It’s a different kind of bad, and it does get better between each round.”
“And it’s fixing her,” Liam said. Not quite a question.
“That’s the goal,” Dr. Li said. “Every round is aimed at that.”
The infusion room was nothing like the rest of the ward — brighter, deliberately cheerful, murals of cartoon fish along one wall and a shelf of donated stuffed animals along another, as though someone had understood early on that a room where children received poison needed to work very hard at not looking like one. A nurse named Denise hooked the first bag to Cissy’s new port with the same easy, unbothered competence Rosa had shown with the collection hat days before.
“This first bag’s going to take about two hours,” Denise explained. “You might feel fine the whole time. You might feel a little sick partway through. Everybody’s different, and there’s no wrong way to feel.”
“What if I throw up?” Cissy asked, eyeing the bag with open suspicion.
“Then we clean it up together and it’s not a big deal at all,” Denise said. “I’ve got a whole drawer of basins with cartoon characters on them. You can pick your favorite.”
Cissy picked one with a cartoon octopus on it, mostly, she admitted, because the colors were pretty, and set it on her lap like a security blanket she hoped not to need.
She didn’t need it for the first hour. Liam, sitting cross-legged on the end of the bed with a book he wasn’t really reading, went quiet around the ninety-minute mark, closing the book without marking his page.
“Denise.” He didn’t raise his voice, but something in it made the nurse turn from the chart she was updating. “She’s going to be sick soon. Not right now. But soon. I can feel it starting.”
Denise glanced at Cissy, who still looked, by any outward measure, perfectly fine — color good, chatting with her mother about something on the television bolted to the wall. “How soon is soon?”
“I don’t know exactly. A few minutes, maybe.”
Denise, who had been doing this job for the better part of a decade and had learned, over that decade, that a nurse who ignored useful information out of skepticism was a worse nurse than one who simply gathered more of it, slid the octopus basin a few inches closer to Cissy’s free hand without comment.
Six minutes later, Cissy went pale mid-sentence and reached for the basin herself, fast, and was sick into it before anyone else in the room had seen it coming at all.
“There you go, sweetheart,” Denise said, already moving, a cool cloth appearing in her hand from some pocket of practiced readiness. “You did great. That’s it, all done, that’s it.”
Cissy, shaking and miserable, reached blindly for Liam’s hand instead of her mother’s, and Liam took it without hesitation, his other hand rubbing slow circles against her back the way he’d apparently decided, on his own, was the correct thing to do.
“You knew,” Denise murmured to him quietly, once Cissy had settled again, pale and spent against the pillows. “Before there was anything to see. How long before, would you say, on average?”
“Maybe five minutes? Sometimes less. It builds up slow and then it’s fast at the end.”
Denise made a note of it — five-minute warning window, patient’s neighbor reliably accurate — in the small, growing collection of things about Liam that had started appearing in Cissy’s chart without anyone officially deciding they belonged there.
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