Surgery is done!

Finally around 8pm, the surgeon came in and talked to us about the long surgery. She said that she spent the 1st hour looking for the hole in the lung, then a 2nd hour separating the upper part of the lung from where it had stuck to the chest wall after the pleurodesis that was done on the 12/13/10. Finally after those 2 hours, they found the problem; a 3mm to 4mm hole in his lung. They spent another hour or so stapling that area and making sure that they do their best to close things up, but they couldn't get too aggressive because it was getting to close to certain critical parts of the lung. They also found a couple of small blebs on the lower portion of the lung, but their size didn't warrant stapling, so they put some sort of plasma gel (glue) on them. They also put this "glue" on most of the staple points along with any other weak spot on the lung that needed it. Afterwards, they introduced the inflammatory agent (talc) into the lung, to initiate the pleurodesis. She said that it should stick great, because they put a lot in there.
When they were re-inflating the lung after surgery, they said they had a couple of minutes with no leak, but they also observed a small air leak later. We can easily notice that the air leak we see in the water seal device, is greatly reduced from before and we're hoping that it will clear up completely during the healing process.
Best case scenario, Luke will need about 3 more days on suction and if the leak appears to go away, then he will go on a different water seal tube (no suction) for 2 days.

We're very thankful that things went as well as they did, and we can only hope and pray that things will improve from here.

KAAL