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.