Angels Watching Over You
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 9: The Long Middle
Radiation
Radiation started three weeks after Cissy came home from the transplant, once her counts had climbed high enough that Dr. Li felt comfortable moving forward. It was, in some ways, the least dramatic-looking part of the entire year — no infusion bags, no long hospital stays, just a daily drive to a different wing of the same hospital, ten minutes on a table, and home again. Dr. Li was careful to warn them it wouldn’t feel small once they were living inside it.
“She’ll need to be completely still for the treatment itself,” Dr. Li explained, the week before it began. “At her age, that means sedation, every single day, for about two weeks straight. It’s not the sedation itself that wears a child down. It’s doing it daily, over and over, with a groggy recovery each time, that adds up.”
“Can Liam be in the room for it?” Bea asked, already anticipating the answer.
“Not during the treatment itself — nobody can, not even staff. The room clears completely and they monitor from outside. But he can be right there before she goes under, and right there when she wakes up. For a lot of kids her age, that matters more than anything happening in between.”
It proved true almost immediately. Cissy’s fear wasn’t of the radiation itself, which she couldn’t feel and barely understood, but of the mask — a molded plastic form fitted tight over her face and shoulders to hold her perfectly still, unnerving in a way that no amount of gentle explanation from the radiation techs seemed to touch.
“It’s going to look at your face right before you go to sleep,” Liam told her, the morning of the first session, holding her hand on the table while a tech made the final adjustments. “It’s not going to hurt. It’s just a shape. Think of it like a really boring Halloween mask that doesn’t even move.”
“Will you be right here when I wake up?”
“Every single time,” he said. “That’s not even a promise. It’s just what’s going to happen.”
It became the shape of the next two weeks — a groggy, difficult morning routine of sedation and the mask, a foggy, irritable afternoon as the anesthesia wore off, and Liam waiting at the edge of it every single day exactly where he’d said he’d be, close enough that his face was the first thing she saw each time her eyes properly focused again.
By the second week, the skin across her lower abdomen had gone red and tender, the ordinary, expected burn of the treatment doing its work, and a persistent, unfamiliar urgency in her bladder had started showing up that nobody, in the crush of everything else happening that year, connected yet to where the radiation field actually reached. Dr. Li noted it in the chart as a likely and manageable side effect of a field extended to cover the lymph node involvement found in staging, and mentioned, almost in passing, that it might not fully resolve for some time. Nobody in the room that day understood yet how much that one small note would matter, months later, in a school administrator’s office none of them could have pictured yet.
Bea noticed the bladder trouble before anyone said the word radiation in connection with it, catching Cissy mid-accident in the hallway one evening and going quietly, privately frightened that something new and separate had gone wrong.
“Is it back?” she asked Dr. Li the next morning, unable to keep the fear out of the question. “Is this a new problem?”
“It’s not a new problem,” Dr. Li said. “It’s an old one wearing a shape you didn’t expect. The radiation field had to extend a little lower than the original tumor site, because of the lymph node involvement we found in staging. Her bladder sits close enough to that edge to feel some of it. It should improve over time, though I won’t promise you a date for that.”
“How much time?”
“Weeks, most likely. Possibly longer. I wish I could give you a firmer number than that.”
Bea carried that answer home and said nothing to Cissy about the word radiation being the cause of something so ordinary and humiliating as a wet pair of underwear, deciding, for now, that her daughter had enough new vocabulary to carry without adding one more heavy word to explain an old embarrassment.
Immunotherapy
Immunotherapy began six weeks after radiation ended, once Cissy’s body had recovered enough to tolerate it, and it turned out to be, by a wide margin, the hardest single stretch since the stem cell rescue — not because it wiped her out the way that had, but because the pain of it, this drug against this disease, was sharper and more immediate than almost anything chemo had done.
“I need you to understand something before we start this,” Dr. Li told them, uncharacteristically direct even for her. “This medication works by training her own immune system to attack any remaining cancer cells. It’s very effective, and it’s also, honestly, one of the more painful treatments we give children — nerve pain, usually in the belly and legs, sometimes severe enough to need a morphine drip running alongside the infusion itself. I won’t pretend otherwise. I’d rather you hear it from me now than be blindsided by it in the room.”
The first infusion bore that warning out within twenty minutes. Cissy went from chatting easily with Denise about a cartoon to gripping the bedrail with both hands, tears coming fast and wordless, unable even to say where it hurt because it seemed to be everywhere at once.
“It’s in her legs,” Liam said, before Denise had finished reaching for the call button, his own hands pressed hard against his own thighs. “Both of them. And her stomach. It’s bad, Denise. It’s really bad, worse than anything before.”
Denise didn’t hesitate, already reaching for the ordered breakthrough dose rather than waiting to confirm it through Cissy herself, who by then could do little but cry. “How bad, one to ten, if you had to guess from what you’re feeling?”
“Nine,” Liam said, without pausing to calculate it. “Maybe higher. I’ve never felt it this bad before, not even the fever week.”
The medication brought it down within minutes, Cissy’s grip on the rail loosening, her breathing evening out into something survivable, and Dr. Li, reviewing the chart the next morning, made a note that would shape the rest of the treatment course: pain management to be initiated preemptively at infusion start, based on patient-support report, rather than waiting for the patient’s own report to catch up to what her body was already doing.
“You saved her twenty minutes of that today,” Dr. Li told Liam afterward, crouching to his level the way she’d taken to doing more often lately. “Twenty minutes doesn’t sound like much. It’s an eternity, feeling like that.”
“I wish I could take all of it instead of her,” Liam said, quiet, not looking for comfort in saying it, just stating a fact about himself the way he stated most things.
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