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7:57am August 16, 2014
Anonymous asked: What are drainage bags?

They’re bags used to catch fluid drained from my g-tube (so mostly bile and stomach acid and air and anything else that happens to be in my stomach).  In my case, I use suction drainage bags.

There’s a tube that screws onto the end of my g-tube, using a luer-lock connector.  Then that goes to a chamber with an accordion.  You press the accordion shut, and it begins to open again.  That creates suction, which pulls air and fluid out of my stomach through the g-tube.  Once the accordion fills up with air and fluid, you press it again.  This way, the air and fluid are pushed into a bag that can store up to a certain amount of fluid before needing to be drained itself.

I’ve come up with several improvements on the design that allow them to work for longer.  I use Velcro to flip the bag upside down so the drain spout is at the top.  This prevents some amount of leakage that is bound to occur at the drain spout.  If a little bit of fluid still reaches the level of the drain spout however it can still leak.  So I cut off the finger of a rubber glove, stuff gauze in the end, and rubber band it to the bottom of the drainage spout, after the spout is put in the closed position.  This catches the small amount of accidental leakage that can happen when the fluid sloshes around during ordinary movement.  I also heavily tape down one end of the tube that goes into the accordion, after discovering that it’s a really nasty surprise if I roll over on the tube and it pops off in my sleep, drenching me in bile.

Without those modifications, the bag wouldn’t last longer than a day or two, because the first thing to happen is the spout starts leaking in small amounts even when closed, and without doing those things it’s unusable.

This is the type of drainage bag I use:

http://www.uresil.com/radiology_products/drainage_sys_access/drainagebag.aspx

This is the particular model:

http://www.saveritemedical.com/product/tru-close-suction-drainage-system-w-drain-port.html

In particular, the model number is:

TCS500D

The D on the end is particularly important, because without that, there’s no drainage spout, and no reusability.  (Not unless I MacGyver one together out of spare parts, and while the first “Frankenstein bag” worked very well, I’m not counting on it working a second time.  There’s just too much that can go wrong with crinkled up plastic around a tube, even with lots of silicone tape.)

So anyway, I’ve tried both suction drainage bags and gravity drainage bags.  Only suction works particularly well for me.

The purpose of the bag is to suck everything out of my stomach.  And the purpose of doing that is that my stomach doesn’t empty well enough on its own. So my stomach continues to build up bile and other fluids, and those go up into my lungs in my sleep, causing me to wake up choking on them, after which I can spend over an hour coughing bile out.  And it doesn’t all come out no matter how much I cough.  Sometimes I can’t breathe and have to be taken to the ER.  But even when I can breathe, I have to go on antibiotics immediately because my bronchiectasis makes me very prone to developing aspiration pneumonia.  Which, coincidentally, I’m developing right now for the first time since December.  Which is a good track record compared to before I got the feeding tube, but it’s still not great to have this happen ever.  It generally happens when something clogs the tube a bit and so stuff doesn’t drain until the next morning.   If I’m unlucky when that happens then my lungs get a bunch of bile in them.

Notes:
  1. withasmoothroundstone posted this