After Dan had halfheartedly picked his way through a breakfast of eggs on toast, Phil decided he needed some breakfast of his own. He made sure Dan was going to be okay by himself for a bit, and then he headed home to grab some breakfast and pack a bag with his and Dan's laptops and few bits of clothing and toiletries.
When Phil returned to the hospital a couple of hours later, something in Dan's demeanor had taken a turn for the worse. As Phil walked into the room, Dan was curled on his side facing away from the door. Phil set his bag down in the corner and placed the cup of coffee he had bought for Dan on the bedside table, being intentionally noisy to alert Dan of his presence.
But Dan didn't move or speak. Phil thought he must be sleeping and immediately felt guilty for making all that noise, but as he came around the bed to the side that Dan was facing, he was surprised to find Dan wide awake.
"Dan?" Phil asked, positioning himself in front of Dan's face.
Dan didn't answer. His chocolatey eyes flickered to meet Phil's for just a heartbeat before resuming their empty, blank stare in the direction of the window.
"You ok?" Phil asked, suddenly concerned. Was he breathing ok? Was he feeling badly again?
Dan nodded, still without saying a word.
Phil sighed. Dan had a tendency toward the overly-dramatic, and he was probably just having himself a little pity party. "I brought you Starbucks?" Phil offered, wondering if that might cheer him up.
"Thanks, Phil," Dan said, a reluctant smile playing at the corners of his mouth, although he made no move to get the coffee, despite the fact that it was well within his reach.
"It'll be cold if you don't drink it soon," Phil scolded.
At this, Dan finally snapped out of whatever sulky trance he had been in and sat himself up to drink the coffee. Phil smiled triumphantly to himself—Starbucks was usually all it took to get Dan back into his right mind.
But even as Dan sipped at his sugary drink, something in his face still left Phil wondering what had happened in the time he'd been gone.
"What's wrong?" Phil finally asked.
Dan slurped his coffee, long and loud, and hesitated a moment before answering. "I'm scared," was all he said, but it tugged at Phil's heart strings.
"But you're doing better already," Phil protested.
"But I—it's just that…" Dan looked as though he might cry.
"What, Dan?" Phil reached out a hand, placing it on Dan's forearm. "Tell me what happened."
"They think it's cancer," Dan blurted out. "There's a mass on my rib and a spot on my lung and they don't know what it is and they said maybe it's cancer, but maybe it's not, but probably it is."
"Oh." Phil didn't know how else to respond. He should never have left Dan alone. He should have been here when the doctor came in to talk to Dan. He should have been here for support, because nobody should have to hear the word cancer spoken about them for the first time without having somebody by their side to lean on.
The two sat in silence until the coffee was all gone, and a nurse came in to fix a beeping IV pump, and a dietary person dropped off Dan's lunch tray, and nobody really said anything for a good while, and the silence wasn't awkward but it was unbearably heavy, and finally Phil had to break it for his sanity's sake. "So what's going to happen next?"
Dan shrugged. "Tomorrow if I'm stable enough they'll do a biopsy. They've already done a bunch of blood tests and they'll probably do more, and those will tell us how likely it is that it's cancer, but the only way to know for certain, and to know what type, is the biopsy. They said it'll be quick but probably hurt, but at this point what's a little more pain on top of the agony I've already been through? I feel like at this point they could rip my lungs out of my chest altogether and I'd hardly notice."
Now it was obvious to Phil that Dan was, indeed, having himself a pity party. However, this time it was different—this time a pity party seemed entirely appropriate. So, instead of trying to drag Dan out of his sorrow, Phil joined him in it. "I'm so sorry."
Dan wiped his nose on the back of his hand like a child. "I'm trying so hard to be optimistic about it, but they're already pretty confident that it's cancer and so hanging on to the shred of a chance that it's not cancer feels like hanging on to false hope."
Phil didn't want to agree with Dan because that point of view felt overly pessimistic, and Phil was certainly not a pessimistic person, but he had to admit that his friend had a point. Right now there was just not a whole lot that Phil could think of to say to fix this.