Ding Ding Ding! Round 2 (or 3, depending on how you're counting)!

Good morning all,

So Karee will be going in today to have her 'trachea shaved'.  Woohoo!  This is the proverbial 'other shoe' we've been waiting to drop.  It was scheduled just a week or so ago, and all thoughts in the past week have led up to, but not very far beyond, this point.

To recap, after opening up her collapsed lung by removing gobs of scar tissue from the entrance to the lung's left main airway, the big plumbing that remained was to take care of the serious narrowing at the top of the trachea/sub-glottal region. Today the E.N.T. surgeon will go in and cut and suck away the scar tissue and dab it with some mighty powerful medicine to hopefully keep it healthy.  A friend of ours who is also an E.N.T. (hi Tyler! and thanks for sharing your expertise!) told us that this magic medicine is what makes this procedure so safe and so successful.  "Mitomycin c" is a chemo-therapy agent apparently, and has been very helpful in the recovery process.  I don't even understand it so much, but he made it seem like a big deal, so I'll jump on that bandwagon. Yay mitomycin c!

So after they do that bit of crucial plumbing, Karee's pulmonologist will take over and go back down into her lungs to check to see how the original surgery is healing.  In our follow up meeting to the original surgeries with the pulmonologist a few weeks ago, he said he might remove some more scar tissue if the situation demands it, but he also might just take a look-see and get out. 

Karee's procedure is at 11:30.  We have to show up at 9:30 and I'm sure she'll get to enjoy being picked and prodded for a while before we settle down and sit in pre-op for a good long while.  I will be passing at least some of the time during the procedure at a new favorite restaurant directly across the road from Swedish (the hospital) with one of our very good friends Kristi.  The plan is that Karee will come home tonight, and then first thing in the morning I get to go to the airport to pick up my sister Beth who is coming for the weekend to hang out with Ella and take care of Karee while I head off to the Suzuki conference in Minneapolis for the weekend.  Just a run of the mill weekend around here, ya know?

I don't expect I'll be updating the blog until we get home, so look for a recap of the days' excitement 6:00 or 7:00pm?

Thanks for all your good wishes!  While we're a little nervous about the procedure (this tissue they're removing is uncomfortably close to my singer wife's vocal cords after all) we're in the hands of the best of the best, and this really should be the beginning of the end.  Hopefully an end to chronic coughing and wheezy breath, and the dawn of a new day!

All for now,

Steve