It's early yet, but it looks like some seriously GOOD NEWS

I'm back in the room with my handy dandy medical translator Don (really, everyone should get a Don!) after the debriefing with the pulmonologist.  Karee is in post-op waking up.  She will come back to the room in half an hour or so.  The news is really the best we could have hoped for.

The situation in her lungs was actually worse than they thought after the brief scoping yesterday.  In the pictures, it looked like a beautiful open right airway and a completely clogged left airway, and a couple of pinholes that somehow were snaking into the left lung.  That was NOT what they were looking at - they were seeing her right airway which was 1/2 way obstructed.  The pinholes were openings to the left lung. 

So she hasn't been breathing through a straw to one good lung instead of two, she was breathing through a straw to half a good lung.  Yikes!!

They went in and scraped away a bunch of scar tissue clogging the right airway, and then proceeded to clear the left airway.  No tumors, just basically scar tissue. A couple of inches of it, and they had opened up the left lung and it looked beautiful down in there!

We're not entirely out of the woods of course, and we don't know exactly what the next steps are, but we're certainly very far from worst-case-scenario land.  Insert another MASSIVE sigh of relief!

Please feel free to leave comments on the posts - Karee has been helped substantially by all the gestures of good will and sincere words of kindness.  Thanks everyone...  If there's more stuff to post, I'll get back to you.  If you're lucky, you'll get to hear the funny and mildly inappropriate jokes I got to tell Karee and the nursing staff in the pre-op!