Feeding tube

After I woke up they had to put a feeding tube in me. My throat was not ready for food or liquids and I needed speech therapy. So a feeding tube needed to be threaded up my nose, down my esophagus, through my stomach and into my small intestines.

First they tried to thread it normally I guess. There's a sort of machine that spools it up into the nose and it's supposed to go its merry way all the way down to the small intestines. But that didn't work so much with me. We tried the right nostril, we tried the left one, we tried the left one again, and let me tell you, the numbing gel they use does very little. It is extremely uncomfortable having something rammed up your nose. I kept thinking about my baby girl who needed a feeding tube at the NICU before she got the hang of the bottle. If she could do it, so could I. But because this method didn't work with me, they needed to take me down to x-ray, and keep me continuously zapped while a technician threaded the tube up my nose, down my esophagus, into my stomach, and that's where she found out why the other method didn't work.

My stomach had partially collapsed. I guess not having any food in my belly for over 3 weeks just made my poor tummy collapse down on itself. The technician was very nice, she was wearing that big bulky x-ray vest and was sort of straddling me on top of the x-ray table, trying to feed this tube in, while watching it on the screen. It took a good 30 minutes but she finally got it and I got a good long view of my internal organs. She noticed my birth date on my hospital bracelet and told me her mother had the same birthday. I told her to wish her mom a happy belated birthday from me.

Because I was so weak when I woke up and was still connected to so much, lines and tubes and all sorts of machinery, they couldn't just plop me into a wheelchair to take me to where they threaded the tube. So they wheeled me down to x-ray in my hospital bed. A porter had to come because this was such a big hospital and my nurse would just have gotten us lost she said. So a very nice man came and sort of punched my husband in the shoulder all manly and said ''she's awake!'' and he kept complimenting my smile. Very nice guy.

This next part is very surreal but it did happen. I even asked my husband afterwards, to make sure it hadn't been one of my hallucinations. They started to wheel my bed out of my ICU room, and as we started down the ICU hallway, everyone, doctors, nurses, orderlies, technicians, hell, maybe even the patients, they all started applauding and whooping. I sort of looked around to see what they were clapping about and realized it was me. Little old me. I felt like I was in a parade, a one ICU bed parade, and all I could do was just smile and wave. It was the most amazing experience.

After they hooked up my feeding tube they hung up a sort of big bag filled with yellow stuff. The bag had the label ''protein''. It was the most unappetizing looking thing ever. This bag was then pumped through my feeding tube at a regular interval. But wait, because the feeding tube went straight to my small intestines, my stomach was still empty and I was therefore still hungry. So hungry.

To be continued...