147.4 Nasogastric Tube Feeding

This shows the pic trauma about to be discussed.
What is it like to have to shove a tiny tube down a itty bitty nose and feel when it hits the end of the nasal cavity and turn to make its descent? All the while you are holding the flailing hands and watching the fear in the eyes. Desperation setting in on both parties to get it out or get it in whatever it's going to take. Then what about when you have to pull it because no matter what you do it's plugged with medicine, usually at two in the morning feeding hour to top it all off. You have cranberry juiced it and water pushed it and that was even warm water and it's just not going to give. What about having to place a stethoscope on the tiny tummy and fearing that you will not hear tummy sounds when you pull back on the syringe that is at the outside end of the tube, but maybe a lung sound, thank goodness that never happed to me. Shall we say FRUSTRATION daily more than once a day sometimes.

Then there is the puking that happens. Because the natural response is to reject foreign matter and it's so a foreign. I finally couldn't take it, we had taught him how to eat, he smeared it all over his face, it got into his mouth, and I could spoon some into his mouth but the tube would often cause havoc because he has texture issues and now days since the trach revision surgery we realize that scar tissue was causing some tightness that caused major smallness for the food to go down with a tube taking all the extra space. Need I say then causing major puking. Jer had been home about 6 months we were doing the daily above described struggle with every meal almost. He was a year old and as round as a baby could be when he puked yet again and I left it OUT. Eating became a bit easier or maybe a little less stressful minus the addition of shoving an NG tube back into his tiny nose after every feeding just because he puked it at some point during the feeding. Even the pretty girl knew how to get it in but the boys including the Nurse Dad refused to help put it in, they would only help hold the flailing hands.

This shows all the different ones they had used on him through the year, yes we had to use every one of them but the Gtube along with all the psychology and the reasons as to why feeding must be done this way. They did want us to have a Gtube but we said no give us time to teach and him to learn.

Kids go through spurts of great eating and then the I don't like that phase when they used to eat it every single meal. I hope that as he gets older he goes back to that normalized smeared all over his face baby eating that we taught him and he gets willing to eat more then just all white foods and dry crusty food. He seriously has oral and sight aversion to KY jelly or anything slimy like it, but I must say thank goodness he will eat something these days. Little does he know how many veggies and slimy fruit is blended and hidden in his pedisure at night these days.

Eating is a continual chore trying to see what he wants to eat for the day telling the youngest of my two boys that they can't have when he can have whatever it is now matter how unhealthy it looks simply because any calorie is better than no calorie at all. And the volume of get hungry medicine or reflux medicine or laxative medicine bugs the heck out of me but it's our normal at least for him.