It’s a beautiful April afternoon. My son is spraying the hose to make rainbows in the back yard, our new dog is finding proper zones for sunshine naps, Lars just put Marvin Gaye on his ball-busting speakers for a little April afternoon soundtrack.

It’s a contrast to my week, which has been a whirlwind of unpleasantness.

At the very least I have sympathy for Angelinos, who spend hours of their lives scurrying from Point A to Point B and then back again in their cramped, annoying cars in cramped annoying traffic. The radiation treatment itself has been mostly easy, but the time in traffic makes me goofy in the head.

On the other hand, watching Dad succumb to the side effects of the radiation has been more difficult. Perhaps if I hadn’t forgotten that he was going to have side effects at all I would have been less alarmed as Dad began to take a precipitous fade. Why did I forget? I don’t know; no logic appears to have been at work on this particular point. Perhaps I imagined that because they weren’t actually trying to cure him, knowing that they were just trying to control a little spot in the soft tissue near his spine, that he wasn’t going to have the severe effects of more intense radiation therapy.

So when Dad showed up to have lunch with us on Friday, wan, listless, exhausted and utterly without appetite I was thrown into a bit of a tizzy. It looked to me, having totally disconnected the radiation with anything other than a stop-gap, that he was in the world’s most rapid decline. And then watching him struggling in and out of the car, barely able to keep his balance and hobbling up and down the stairs brought it even further home. I was ready to call the oncologist with a completely inarticulate rant about Dad’s turn for the worse.

Though he didn’t show it, Dad was worried too. Not only was he exhausted, but he was having incontinence issues out of the blue and was, shall we say, slightly concerned; it didn’t look any better from the inside than it did to us on the outside.

But he called me yesterday with an epiphany (“I was dealing with my teeth at the time–I don’t know why it occurred to me then.”) that these were textbook symptoms of radiation treatments. “All of the sudden it just dawned on me, ‘Wait–I’ve read all this before.’ And then I knew I needed to call you to ease your mind, too.”

Good lord, yes. Please.

That the side effects of the radiation could so closely resemble the very symptoms of succumbing to cancer itself reminds us, rather belatedly and stupidly, that cancer treatment is something one must survive as well. So when one talks about being a “cancer survivor,” they’re really talking about being a “cancer treatment survivor;” it’s no picnic and I’m made uneasy thinking about chemo and all the other cancer interventions which may yet be set on the table.

How could we, collectively a pretty brainy lot, mistake what was textbook radiation poisoning? I pick up all the pamphlets about treatments lying around the oncologists and urologists office and read them; why did this not sink in? It’s like when Dad first came down with what seemed like a bladder infection, starting losing weight, began bemoaning the depredations of old age–we missed the boat on that too. Seriously, what is the disconnect? Are we too close and can’t see the side effects for the disease?

One more week of radiation sickness.

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