Update on Angry

Time has passed, things have happened, and answers have been given.
Life is much less stressful now, and we can continue without things pressing down on us so much.
My husband went in for his surgery on April 26th. We went in at about 9:30AM, and he was wheeled into the operating room around 12:45. Lucky guy has no real memory of most of the pre-operative time, as they gave him a sedative an hour and a half before he was wheeled in, and he basically slept all the way to the surgery, without having any memory of being put under general anaesthetic either. (He was, of course)
I wandered for a few hours, trying to kill time, but not willing to leave the hospital, in case he was out early, or they needed to get in touch with me or, worst case scenario, things went horribly wrong. So I wandered and munched on things and drank bubble tea and read a good chunk of a novel and watched soaps and daytime talk shows in the waiting room...and finally at about 5:30 the surgeon phoned me (not sure why he didn't check the waiting room) to tell me my husband was out of surgery, in the recovery room, and would be in his hospital room in about an hour or two.
They had removed a mass the size of a mandarin orange, but the mass did not appear to be cancerous. They had to send it away for testing, to make sure and to find out exactly WHAT it was (they still didn't know).
The first night, they had him in the Cardiac Surgery Unit. I guess that would be their equivalent of one step below ICU...his surgery was pulmonary, not cardiac, but that was where he'd have the best care, I suppose.
The next afternoon, he was moved to the cardio-pulmonary unit down the hall. He was definitely a candidate for the Sesame Street song "One of these things does not belong here"...every other patient on that ward was at least 40 years older than he was. I guess lung surgery is usually not performed on younger people.
He had a few very uncomfortable days, as he was originally hooked up to an IV, a catheter, a lung tube, and oxygen. He very quickly managed to heal enough to have all but the chest tube removed...probably about 3 days, I think. He worked really hard at healing. Hospital beds are not very comfortable when you are 5'11".
Once he was off everything but the chest tube, he started walking around the ward. He was supposed to...kept the blood flowing and helped his lung to drain. He did overdo it a few times, though.
Once the chest tube was out, he was up and out, walking the ward as much as they would let him. All he had to wait for at that point was an xray and the surgeon to look at it and say he could go home. He had his chest tube out on Sunday (May 1) and his chest Xray that night. He was told that as soon as the surgeon looked at it and gave his okay, he could go home, and the surgeon was usually in early in the morning...so we expected him to be home by lunchtime on Monday at the latest.
Nope. The surgeon did not show up until 6:30PM. Interestingly enough shortly after I made it abundantly clear to the nurses that if the surgeon didn't come, I was taking my husband home anyway, permission or not. :-D
So about 7PM we were on our way home. I think he was very glad to be sleeping in his own bed, though it took a few nights for him to find a comfortable position, and he had a hard time remembering not to overdo things....the biggest issue was the stairs. It's easy to forget how taxing going up and down the stairs can be when you have spent a week in a hospital with no stairs.
He had 27 staples in his back from the incision and a few stitches in his side from the chest tube. These were all removed a week later, on May 9.
Since then, he has more or less returned to normal...he still hasn't got full lung capacity yet, but I think he's close, and he still overdoes things some days and ends up sore, but he is back at work, he can ride a bike without pain, and if you didn't know he'd had surgery, and met him on the street, you'd never know.
He's never going to be swimsuit model now, though. :-D
We got the results, finally, on the mass, last weekend...apparently there was some sort of irritant that got into his lymph node in his lung lining, and as far as we can understand doctor-speak (they didn't explain it in layman's terms), his body just started wrapping the irritant, like a cocoon, and kept going and going and going. Now that it has been removed, this SHOULD be the end of all of this.
But no signs of cancer, whatsoever. Big sigh of relief.
He returns to the surgeon to have a fresh xray done, and hopefully to be given a clean bill of health and permission to fly this summer, on June 8th.