Hi everyone,

I posted a thank you to everyone on the posting from Cat and Mouse, but I wanted to start a new thread to update all of you. I'm sitting here in the library at Presb/St Lukes waiting for my husband to get out of recovery. The surgery just finished (3.5 hours) and I spoke with the doctor. He said he found exactly what he expected in terms of new bone growth. The CT scan done in August laid it all out for him, so he just had to go in and find the bones (refer to my original post where I explain the problem if you don't follow this). He said the tricky part was detaching the nerve endings from the bone growth. He also said in terms of scar tissue, it doesn't get much worse than what he saw in there. The anterior stump (the portion of the rib left in) has been rubbing up against anything and everything for the last year or so creating a lot of havoc. He also said he found that my husband had had pneumonia at one time and the lungs had some scarring on them which attached them to the chest cavity - so he removed that also and freed up the lungs.

Now it's time and religiously doing his PT which will tell us whether this is going to work or not. We spoke to the physical therapist yesterday and Ray is supposed to start today in doing his nerve glides which will keep nerves from getting caught up again.

So keep us in your thoughts and I'll keep you all posted on his recovery process.