THANK GOD IT'S FRIDAY
BC PIRES
THE LAY PATIENT could be forgiven for thinking that, amongst the surgeon's instruments of torture, the NG or nasogastric tube must be pre-eminent. A stiff plastic tube as long as your arm, it's lubricated before insertion in your nose, about as effectively as putting a drop of olive oil on a watermelon before ramming it through a buttonhole.
The surgeon forces the stiff plastic tube down one of your nostrils and into the stomach. The difficult bit is the back of your throat, where you really can't discern whether you're swallowing a boa constrictor or a stiletto. If you can swallow an NG tube without vomiting, you can join the circus.
Thankfully, most NG tubes are inserted while the patient is under general anaesthetic. If you do have one done awake, you remember it longer than your wedding day.
I had one inserted that way.
The first thing you do to avoid the NG tube is try to bend away from the doctor's hands, but you might as well bend away from a tank in Tiananmen Square. With NG tubes, what is to is must is, and it must is by overcoming your massive gag reflex.
It's one thing to lick a popsicle, another to swallow a tug's docking rope. The kangaroo penises enamoured by television reality shows are palatable in comparison.
But the NG tube is as necessary as it is evil to drain unwanted stomach fluids through the nose into what looks like a miniature pony's feedbag.
And, if you do get an NG tube, it's almost impossible to get rid of it. No doctor wants to replace one on a waking patient, so they just leave them in, more or less forever.
When they do take them out, they do so with a swift, smooth uninterrupted motion, which we would call yanking, if master surgeons weren't involved. The tube is removed in one mercifully quick go - but it still feels exactly like throwing up everything in your stomach through your nostril.
You wear this tube, taped to your lips and/or face from the moment it's in until the last second before you walk out the hospital door. You learn (courtesy the sharp pain accompanying it) to try never to drop the bag - but it is unavoidable when you're trying to dress or go to the bathroom - or do anything at all, with only one free hand and the equivalent of a heavy bag of M&Ms hanging from your nose.
The lay patient would think that the next most effective doctor's torture tool after the NG tube is simple hunger. Spend a week in hospital and you'll discover that, if you stare at your doctor too belligerently, you run the risk of her snapping, 'Liquid diet!'
And then you're firetrucked.
But the most evil torture tool in the doctor's arsenal is the jejunostomy, or stomach-feeding, tube. With this tube, you are fed without reference to your mouth at all.
From midday on January 15 up to and including today, I have had nothing solid to eat via my mouth, apart from a couple of small bowls of ice chips ha
