The most vivid memory I have of my dad’s cancer treatment is a silent one. In it, we are alone in a dark, curtained room just off the emergency ward. I no longer remember why ― some complication related to his colon cancer, which seemed to mutate as quickly as we could consult doctors. It was cancer in one place, then two. It was stage 1, stage 4, seesawing back and forth depending on whom we asked. He’d be fine after chemo, radiation, an eight-hour surgery. He was fine, indefinitely — then,