Feeding Tubes

Feeding tubes are used for patients who either have trouble swallowing, eating, or can't get enough calories in for some reason or other.

I got mine because I have a severe feeding dysfunction not otherwise specified. I was falling asleep every time I ate and that was determined to be dangerous, obviously, since sometimes I had to drive right after I ate. Plus, I was never awake long enough to be productive. Plus, we found out that even though I was eating 2-3000 calories per day I was still losing weight meaning I was not absorbing the food I was eating so obviously something wasn't working anyway. Long story short, when we placed my feeding tube we ended up finding out my stomach only has 25% nerve functioning so that's what was going on so I will never have any use of my stomach again so food is useless to me at this point so I'm almost entirely tube dependent at this point. But back to feeding tubes.

There are 7 alternate forms of feeding.

There are 3 non-surgical tubes, 3 surgical tubes, and 1 IV tube!

The 3 non-surgical tubes go in your nose and are pretty uncomfortable, in my opinion, and are the NG (naso-gastric), NJ (naso jejunal), and ND (naso duodenal) which is not a common tube).

The 3 surgical ones are the G (gastric), the J (jejunal) that's the one I have, and the G-J (the gastric jejunal) which is actually 2 tubes in one.

The IV one is TPN and is a last resort for feeding and is not as common at all as the other ones.

There are lots of resources on the internet of how to take care of your tube and some places to buy some cool accessories. I love www.feedingtubeawareness.com, www.oley.org, and www.trendietubies.com.



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