Down Deep into the Pain

  It was January 7th, 2010 and my sweetie had just come from the doctors office with his biopsy results. He had been complaining of a chronic ear ache and pain in his neck and shoulder for years.
  He'd been going to the pulmonologist for the past few years complaining of shortness of breath and these aches that would not go away. The doctor said she thought he had asthma and wrote him a prescription for an inhaler. When that didn't help, she said she thought it was bronchitis and gave him a prescription for another inhaler. Then she said she thought it was copd and wrote him another prescription for yet another type of inhaler. Finally after about 2 years of this, she said walking pneumonia and prescribed some antibiotics.
  It wasn't helping though, and he still had this chronic ear ache bothering him so he went to a different doctor to have it looked at. That doctor said he couldn't see anything obviously wrong in his ear and asked if there was anything else he needed. My sweetie said 'well, I've had pain in my neck and shoulder for a long time and it really hurts when I cough' and that doctor decided to order an x-ray. It came back showing a large mass in his right lung and a biopsy was ordered.
  And now the results were in. He came home, pulled up a chair, took my hand and told me it was cancer - stage 3b. I immediately burst into tears. No...please god, please...no. Anything but that! Why?! We were supposed to grow old together! We should have had another 30 years together easy... This just can't be happening!
  But it was happening. He had been misdiagnosed by his pulmonologist for the last few years and now that we knew what it was, it was too late. I was an emotional wreck and I took to my bed and laid there crying into my pillow for a week, inconsolable.
  I could hear him on the phone in the other room talking to one of his friends, saying that he was surrounded by weeping women but the worst part for him was seeing how hard his sweetie was taking it. He had been trying to comfort me for days; spooning me in bed, stroking my hair, telling me he loved me and asking what I wanted him to get me for my birthday. My birthday? My birthday?! Fuck my birthday! It so doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things! I blubbered that I wanted a cure for cancer, I wanted him to live...and he gently told me he'd love for that birthday wish to come true but he was hoping for a more immediate idea.
  He had spoken to his dad on the phone who offered to drive down from St. Cloud with the trailer and take my sweetie and his motorcycle down south so he could go for a ride, clear his head and decide on a course of action. They left for Texas the weekend after my birthday. The house never felt so empty or me so alone.