NG for BC

THANK GOD IT’S FRIDAY

BC PIRES

THE LAY PATIENT could be forgiven for thinking that, amongst the surgeon’s instruments of torture, the NG or nasogastric tube must be pre-eminent. A stiff plastic tube as long as your arm, it’s lubricated before insertion in your nose, about as effectively as putting a drop of olive oil on a watermelon before ramming it through a buttonhole.

The surgeon forces the stiff plastic tube down one of your nostrils and into the stomach. The difficult bit is the back of your throat, where you really can’t discern whether you’re swallowing a boa constrictor or a stiletto. If you can swallow an NG tube without vomiting, you can join the circus.

Thankfully, most NG tubes are inserted while the patient is under general anaesthetic. If you do have one done awake, you remember it longer than your wedding day.

I had one inserted that way.

The first thing you do to avoid the NG tube is try to bend away from the doctor’s hands, but you might as well bend away from a tank in Tiananmen Square. With NG tubes, what is to is must is, and it must is by overcoming your massive gag reflex.

It’s one thing to lick a popsicle, another to swallow a tug’s docking rope. The kangaroo penises enamoured by television reality shows are palatable in comparison.

But the NG tube is as necessary as it is evil to drain unwanted stomach fluids through the nose into what looks like a miniature pony’s feedbag.

And, if you do get an NG tube, it’s almost impossible to get rid of it. No doctor wants to replace one on a waking patient, so they just leave them in, more or less forever.

When they do take them out, they do so with a swift, smooth uninterrupted motion, which we would call yanking, if master surgeons weren’t involved. The tube is removed in one mercifully quick go – but it still feels exactly like throwing up everything in your stomach through your nostril.

You wear this tube, taped to your lips and/or face from the moment it’s in until the last second before you walk out the hospital door. You learn (courtesy the sharp pain accompanying it) to try never to drop the bag – but it is unavoidable when you’re trying to dress or go to the bathroom – or do anything at all, with only one free hand and the equivalent of a heavy bag of M&Ms hanging from your nose.

The lay patient would think that the next most effective doctor’s torture tool after the NG tube is simple hunger. Spend a week in hospital and you’ll discover that, if you stare at your doctor too belligerently, you run the risk of her snapping, “Liquid diet!”

And then you’re firetrucked.

But the most evil torture tool in the doctor’s arsenal is the jejunostomy, or stomach-feeding, tube. With this tube, you are fed without reference to your mouth at all.

From midday on January 15 up to and including today, I have had nothing solid to eat via my mouth, apart from a couple of small bowls of ice chips handed over reluctantly, like a skinflint merchant begrudgingly giving a shopper a small discount rather than lose the whole sale. I only began sipping smoothies and light soups last Friday, February 3.

It’s no surprise to learn I dropped from 175lbs on December 10 to a shocking 129 on February 7. From January 18, the only food I took in was more “put in” directly to my intestines via the j-tube, the small feeding tube protruding from my abdominal left side. (Again, thank the Heavens, Small Mercies Department, it was inserted while I was unconscious.)

On my last day in hospital, on January 27, I watched my neighbour in the ward sit up on the edge of his bed. He pulled a peeled orange from a bag his family had brought. Gazing past me and out of the window, he pulled the sliced orange apart in halves and, watching the glorious mountains, quietly sucked his orange dry.

There is nothing you cannot take for granted until you lose it.

BC Pires is being recast as an extra in Schindler’s List. More on the jejunostomy tube in TGIF next week, the best Carnival reading in town.