Now I know what it feels like

Thursday evening-Friday morning Mike drinks a concoction that is designed to "cleanse his colon" 8 ounces every 10 minutes for an hour. Take an hour off. Repeat until clear. Mike & I arrive at the hospital for the 11:30 appointment, go through the registration, into the prep/recovery room, he puts on his cute hospital gown and he is hooked up to an EKG & IV. The nurse is a good friend of mine who gives Mike a hard time just because she can. The anesthesiologist comes in and preps Mike for the procedure as he'll be completely knocked out for it. Not long after he is wheeled away for both the upper & lower GI scopes. About 45 minutes later the nurses bring Mike back to the prep/recovery room, get him situation, rattle off some numbers, say something to the anesthesiologist about removing a polyp and nobody says a word to me other than "he went through everything just fine and should be waking up in the next five minutes or so". About 10 minutes later, Mike wakes up. Nobody comes to the room for the longest time. I finally went out to ask if he could at least have some water and eventually a nurse came back to say she was sorry, but the doctor ordered more tests. An x-ray and CT scan would be taken in about an hour or so. In the meantime Mike gets to drink more of the "GoLightly" crap to clean out his already cleaned out system. We are told that the doctor would be in to see us before going to x-ray. Then nothing. The nurses leave. We wait. About 45 minutes later the doctor comes in and looks really uncomfortable. Somewhere in the back of my head I can hear myself saying "don't say it, you are not going to say what it looks like you are going to say". What I hear instead is, "There's no easy way to say this, but Mike, you have colon cancer". Now I know what it feels like to hear "you have cancer". Of course it wasn't said to ME, but it might as well have been. Mike is me. I am him. It's always been us. I'm not sure what else was said during the next bit of eternity because I was too busy trying not to throw up or pass out. My chest hurt and I couldn't get any air. Apparently, yawning is a reflex to get more oxygen into your body because I just couldn't stop yawning and I was anything but sleepy.