ok, looks like I'm gonna help answer my question here. What's draining is chyle from the lymph area. Two drains still in. Doc has put Mike on a medium chain triglyceride diet (MCT) which involves apparently a type of fat that does not excrete through the lymph system. So, we get sent home on Friday and he's told to take 6-7 T of MCT oil daily and drink 6-7 Breeze to keep calories up. Apparently none of this stuff can be bought outright so we had to order through pharmacy and will finally get it tomorrow afternoon. I spent all day Saturday calling places and checked three including a specialty place in Indy before heading home. (If I could kick the nutritionist's a$$ I would. No mention from her that we couldn't actually obtain the stuff we needed. And the print out about the diet she handed me was the same article I had shown her on the net.) Anyhow, in the meantime I've been shoving high calorie/no fat or low fat food at Mike and the chyle is changing color which I will take to be a good thing as it is no longer whitish looking. So far my research has shown that only 1 - 2.5% of persons having a neck dissection get this complication. I've seen varying reports on the ability of this diet to stop the drainage - everything from 50-50% to 90% success rate. When I ran a search on the site for this I found only 3 posts ever. If anybody else has ever run into this and has words of wisdom let me know. Thanks.