Colonoscopies are a breeze, it’s the “bowel prep” sucks. A day or so on a clear diet of non-red, non-purple liquids, a slurry of laxative and Gatorade, a surly disposition, and some serious hunker-down time in the bathroom. They’ve used this sort of thing at Gitmo. Enough said.

On the morning of February 3rd, Lisa dropped me off in Towson for the procedure, which takes a few hours. She headed to work and waited for the nurses to call and tell her I was done. On the way, Lisa picked up coffee somewhere. I hadn’t had any in 30 hours.

I’ll spare you the colonoscopy details. For the curious, a Google image search on “colonoscopy” should set you up nicely.

When I woke up, the doctor who performed the procedure immediately showed Lisa and I a picture he’d just taken from inside my colon. I have a copy of it. Google will have to help with this again. Suffice it to say, it was obvious where healthy colon ended and tumor began. What wasn’t obvious was the size of the thing.

The doctor was refreshingly blunt; his years and years of experience told him it was cancer. The biopsy would most likely confirm this. This was a bit before noon, and he had already set up an appointment with an oncologist at 4pm that day.

The details of the rest of the day are hazy. I think we went home. I drank that coffee and ate a sandwich. We cried. Lisa called and texted people. I think we lay in bed. We told ourselves it would be OK.

The oncologist at Union Memorial was also a nice, blunt doctor. He drew a picture of my insides (the first of many – I wish had kept them all), explained the difference between the rectum and the colon, and talked about how colorectal cancer is now treated versus a few years ago. He said a lot of reassuring things about my age and general good health and the survival rate being really really high. He thought my sisters should get checked out. An appointment for a CT Scan was set for Friday, February 5th.