Me and My Food Tube

I didn't want to blog this until after the last weekend because my Meadville class was engaged in a special exercise and I didn't want this to have any chance of interfering. That may just be ego on my part. I dunno...

But in any case, I now have a food tube. Or "G-tube." Or "button." Or "PEG tube." My radiology doc insisted.

His rationale is that, given the type of radiation I'm receiving and the locations that are being irradiated mean that my mouth and throat may become so sore that swallowing becomes difficult. If so, I'm likely to cut back on my caloric intake, and lose body mass and strength. The food tube, which connects the outside world directly to the stomach, eliminates this problem completely, as I can just have a serving of a special nutritional liquid delivered straight to my tummy.

And having the food tube installed now -- before the throat soreness gets severe -- would be the easiest path to follow, as the description of its insertion below should explain. If I don't need the tube, it simply sits there, taped to my abdomen and it can simply be withdrawn at the end of the treatment schedule and no harm done.

I wasn't keen on the idea, but the doc's logic was unassailable.

The way this is installed is pretty cool: an endoscope (which is a flexible fiber-optic tube with a light on the business end) was inserted through my mouth and fed down my esophagus to my stomach. While I was under anasthesia, of course. The docs can then look around through the endoscope for the best place (left/right and up/down) for the penetration to take place.

The light is bright enough to be seen outside the body, so it's obvious to see where to start the penetration from the outside. (The image that comes to mind is Tinker Bell zooming left and right inside my innards. But it probably didn't look much like that. I wasn't paying attention.)

A needle was inserted through the abdominal wall and into the stomach -- aiming at the light. Then a suture (read "surgical thread") is passed through the wall and attached to the endoscope. So when the endoscope is withdrawn, it takes the suture with it. So at that point in the procedure, I had a string passing down my throat and out my tummy wall.

The PEG tube assembly ("PEG" standing for "Percutaneous Endoscopic Gastrostomy" -- Hi Lisa! Hi Emily! Hi Donna! Hi Barbara!) is attached to the upper end of the suture, then pulled down the esophagus and into place by tugging on the lower end of the string. "Tugging" is probably the wrong word, but you get the idea.

So there's nothing foreign in my mouth or throat after all this is over. I hope everyone got that.

I'm not clear on the anchoring methods used to secure the tube in place to both my abdominal wall on the outside and my stomach on the inside, but I am informed that people run marathons with tubes like this in place. And it doesn't leak -- I'm told. We'll see. And I'm allowed to sleep on my back or either side -- but not on my tummy. Which I never do anyway, so that's no loss.

The results of the operation have resulted in considerable physical distress from time to time and my first doses of pain medication, but I am assured that this will end soon as my body gets accustomed to the new device. And I now have Visiting Home Nurses (who are wonderful!!) making sure that the tube is clean and the wound is not infected and so forth.

The "rest of the story" includes some heroic work on the part of the radiology treatment center staff to get me to treatment on Friday. It's a very cool story I hope to relate later today or tomorrow.