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6:56pm April 25, 2013

Feeding tubes aren’t pitiful or scary. Stop it.

Every time an LNA comes in for the first time since seeing me before I went to the hospital, she always says “You have a feeding tube?!” Without bothering to disguise the horror or pity in her voice. I always get so pissed off it’s hard to even say yes. This feeding tube is extending my life – I could easily have been dead by now without it, the way things were going, it would only have taken another couple bad infections. And you expect me to feel bad about having it???

Of course they never felt bad for me when I had to choke down the same exact kind of Ensure and meds every day while fighting pain and nausea to keep it all down, and still was losing weight really fast.

Not that pity would have felt good to me then either. But at least they would have been expressing bad emotions about something that actually felt bad to me. The feeding tube doesn’t feel bad. It feels like freedom from all those bad things that happened before. Not that they entirely go away – I can still aspirate, I still have nausea and stomach pain, I still have gastroparesis and reflux after all and still have to work hard managing it – but they’re much improved.