Month: October 2017

For the uninitiated, NG tube is short for nasogastric tube. Exactly as I described, it’s a plastic tube that doctors shove down your nose, past your throat, and into your stomach. In the last installment, you saw that my doctors had to reinsert a catheter. Now, they were saying I might need this too.

As you read last time, it sometimes takes the body a while to recover enough from surgery to restore normal functions. For example, I wasn’t peeing enough, so I needed a catheter. Now I was learning that I wasn’t digesting enough, so they might need to stick a tube down my nose to vacuum up the bile in my stomach until I was able to digest properly. I asked several doctors and nurses about this and they all told me the same thing – an NG tube is incredibly uncomfortable and I should do whatever I can to avoid getting one.

I could never properly describe the feelings of stress and hopelessness of this situation. All I had to do was digest and I’d be fine. How the hell do you make yourself digest though? Every minute that passed was bringing me closer to more suffering and no matter how much I willed my body to comply, nothing was happening. I was already demoralized that they had reinserted a catheter. I’d been hurting for so long that I was pretty sure that if I had to endure this too, I would finally break.

Unanswered prayers are often part of being a patient in the hospital. If you remember from last time, my doctors were telling me that I’d need an NG tube if I didn’t start digesting soon. After getting that news, I walked around and bounced up and down as often as I could. I’d been told that getting an NG tube was very unpleasant and that moving around could help me digest. It did not.

I held in the vomit for days, but in the end, I lost the fight. I couldn’t get the bile to pass through, so I threw up liters of black and green onto the floor of my hospital room and into a bucket they’d given me for just in case. Here’s the thing guys, I felt defeated, but I wasn’t surprised. When they told me I might need one, I was scared, but I also just kind of knew it was inevitable.

As some of my Twitter buddies pointed out, NG tubes are given for relief, not torture. I didn’t want one, but I also knew that if I needed one, it would help me feel better. Like I said, I’d been holding on to vomit for days. That in itself is already very unpleasant. So, when I threw up, I felt  twinge of despair, but I mostly just felt resigned and hopeful that even though things were lousy right now, at least I’d get some relief.