So here’s the deal guys – NG tubes do bring relief, but they are also very unpleasant. In the last installment, you saw that despite my best efforts to start digesting again after surgery, nothing worked. I’d held it in for days, but in the end, I threw up liters of bile everywhere. That sealed the deal and meant I’d need an NG tube.
At first, it wasn’t bad at all. Doctors took a lubed up tube and fed it down my nose, past my throat, and into my stomach. Yes, it felt weird going in, but once it was in and started vacuuming up bile, I started to feel a lot better. As I mentioned before, willing yourself to hold in vomit for days is also very unpleasant, so the vacuuming was a relief. And really, the tube just felt like post-nasal drip. Annoying, but manageable.
After a while though, it started to drive me crazy. I felt the constant need to swallow, but swallowing didn’t help. Then my nose and throat started to get irritated and raw. Doctors gave me chloraseptic spray to help, but it wasn’t very effective. On top of that, I had already been feeling uncomfortable tugs from the catheter when I’d move around or try to sleep, but now I was feeling them through my nose and throat too. In short, I was pretty miserable overall and I still hadn’t even been able to look at the ostomy yet.
As a heads up, the next few entries will cover my life in this state. The Crohn’s Saga is mostly to educate, but it’s also here to help me cope with memories of events I couldn’t emotionally manage at the time. The few days I spent with an IV, a catheter, and an NG tube were very difficult. I had mostly kept my chin up throughout that past year of being sick, but these were the days when I finally started to crack. These were the days when I finally started to despair.