Answers.... maybe

So, we got through the dreaded colonoscopy. I know it's mostly a routine exam for the majority of people, but in our case, looking forward to it involved a whole lot of apprehension on what we might find.

We went in fairly early in the morning. The ironic part was that the patient scheduled for the first procedure of the day just ahead of B turned out to be my dad! I hadn't had any idea that he was going in until I spoke with my mom the night before. Evidently he'd had a pretty intense attack of diverticulitis himself over the holidays and after, and was just now recovering. I called her to find out how he was doing before we left the house, and they were just leaving to go to Denny's for breakfast, since he was awake and ravenous. That was encouraging.

B's a veteran of the procedure; he had one ten years or so ago, so he wasn't nervous at all. He left me in the waiting room as the nurse called him back, waving at me with a jaunty grin. "See you in an hour!"

I sat back down when he went through that door in a waiting room chair, holding my unopened book, staring at the wall. The whole import of the exam, what they were looking for and what they might find seemed to thrum in my brain. Five minutes later, the nurse came back out and called my name. "He's asking for you," she said, and led me back to where he was, lying in the bed begowned and IV'ed, my beautiful blue-eyed man.

He captured my hands in his. "I forgot to tell you I love you," he said, scooping me close for a kiss.

"I love you too," I whispered, touching his cheek. "I'll be right out there, and I'll be right here when you wake up."

The hour and a half wait was difficult, knowing that he lay behind me only the thickness of the wall, undergoing anaesthesia while the doctor dug for the answers to his mystery pain. Before he went in I confessed to him, "I don't know whether to pray for them to find something or to find nothing."

And then it was over, another nurse coming out to tell me he was okay and awake, waiting for me. She sat down next to me to talk to me and laughed. "Do you know who I am?" she said. "I didn't realize it either until I looked at the name on his chart." She shook my hand. "My sister is married to B's brother." We both laughed. Small world...

They made me wait by the back door until he was dressed and ready, though I could hear him in the recovery bay just twenty feet away. I wanted to go help him; I could hear that he was having some difficulty with his clothes and getting up and about. And then finally he was there, shuffling down the hall a little carefully and wobbly, but gloriously, wonderfully there. The second nurse, his sister-in-law, helped him into the chair beside me but before she did, he turned to her and introduced me. "This is M," he said, pulling me to his side, "This is the love of my life." His beatific smile was its own reward.

To make a long story short, when the doc came out and showed us the pictures, they found some of what they expected - the pockets of diverticuli that were infected and hurting him (and ironically enough, we had marked them with a pen on the outside of his tummy the night before, and they were sure enough right where he'd felt them). But they also found and removed a polyp, far up in his colon, which they were sending off for biopsy. It was rather large. It may or may not be anything of concern, but for the week we wait for results, it'll be enough to keep us on our toes waiting. And they found nothing whatsoever in the kidney area where he was having so much pain. So in a way, we had a lot of relief, but still some frustration.

The only bright spot is that mom reported that dad, with his diverticuli, was having the same sort of pain that had referred up to his lower back/kidney area too, so perhaps we have found the source of the problem. There is no treatment other than the antibiotics that he's already made his way through, so only time will tell.

Things like these underscore the tenuosity of life, and how very fortunate we are to have it. It also makes it so much more urgent for him to be done with his legal problems, so that we can take care of our own union. We went through the 'what-if's' the night before; how would he set me up as the next of kin to make medical decisions if he couldn't, how we would handle our affairs, whohowwhatwhenwhere. It's time for us to be able to legalize this love... we are each others' whole world. As in the diverticuli, only time will tell.