I definitely empathize with you both. To take your dh's side ... I did the same. I had symptoms of ... well, it could have been many things, but turned out to be Crohns Disease and the symptoms were the same as your dh's: blood in stools, abdominal pain, also some you didn't mention such as increasing diarrhea (SO much easier to spell in Norwegian ). I had the symptoms for 2 years, but convinced myself that they weren't really important. I'd been pregnant when they started, so first I thought it was maybe due to the pregnancy. Then my baby had blood in his stools too and I was told that it didn't signify anything, so I took that to be true for me as well even though deep down I knew that pediatric and adult symptoms are very different. Finally it got to where I was having trouble getting through a day's work, so I looked up the symptoms in a book (I worked at a hospital research institute, so we had lots of medical reference books handy) and found out that those symptoms indicated I should be examined IMMEDIATELY because at least one possible diagnosis was potentially lethal if not treated early. Well, I was lucky. I got only ("only") the second or third most serious diagnosis. It wasn't colon cancer, it was Crohns. It could also have been something even less serious, such as hemeroids (sp?). I've also since learned that even the scariest of the possible diagnoses -- colon cancer -- has a high cure rate if caught before it spreads. So ...

my message to you for now is to try not to worry too much before the diagnosis is made. You've done the right thing in making the appointment, but there ARE other possible causes for this than cancer, and even if it is colon cancer there is a good survival rate nowadays. Try to keep your spirits up, and we'll all pitch in and hope along with you.