It’s been a year. A year and a few days. Friday 13 November 2020. That’s when they finally succeeded in installing the percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy (PEG) tube. For those who weren’t blog-reading then, it’s the external tube that goes directly into the stomach. Through it I syringe nutritional liquid, in my case Ensure, which seems to have all the ingredients to keep me alive. Ensure and water. Nothing by mouth, as I can’t swallow even the tiniest liquid or solid without choking.
How’s it been?
In one sense it’s a miracle. 1200ml, a little over two pints in volume, every day has kept me going. You can buy the same stuff as a supplement. In my case it’s the total diet. Amazing.
It’s available in three flavours: strawberry, banana and vanilla. Charmingly, each time we order another month’s supply they ask which flavour I prefer. Let me tell you, the stomach doesn’t sense flavours. I have not tasted a flavour since November last year.
Food: do I miss it? You bet! Not a morsel has passed the DP lips for a year. I’m never hungry but the sight of delicious meals brings pangs of longing.
Booze? What do you think? Oh for a few pints of lager! Oh for a bottle of bubbly! I did try pouring some wine down the tube a while ago. No taste of course but also no effect, but then it was only a glassful. That wouldn’t have had much effect if swallowed. Didn’t have the courage to tip a bottle down.
Only Ensure for a year …. so what else? This blog is no place to discuss bowel movements, so I won’t. Suffice it to say they’re strange, but pleasantly (or not) accompanied by the full choral sound spectrum, from soprano to bass.
Well that’s about it, I suppose. A year without food. A year without alcohol. Another world.
Why the title ‘Time 1’? Let’s wait for Time 2 and Time 3.
David old son! Of all the senses I’ve always rated taste highly. If I found myself without it but, like you, relished the sight and possibilities of food, I suspect I’d hark back to former memories of the dish in question and wallow in them. What a verb that ‘wallow’ is… !
Dear David,
Thank you for inspiring us all when you were a Lay Reader at the Canterbury Group in Dhahran.
David… I can assure you the Ensure drinks don’t taste too bad at all… My mother required nutritional supplement for a while before her recent passing, and to encourage her to drink I’d have one too… Strawberry tasted of ‘red’ but Banana was truly ‘banana’!!! Musical wind though??? Maybe she waited till I was gone!!