Hey Bartender, Colby Needs a Refill!

So this pic shows how Colby eats right now. Its the dreaded "NG Tube" or Nasogastric tube. If you're really into this, you can watch a how-to video on Nasogastric tube placement via YouTube. Yes Jess and I both learned how to do this and had to do it once before we left the hospital. It wasn't as bad as we thought but still not a pleasant thing to have to do to someone, especially a baby. Currently, Colby is sporting a 30 Day tube so he doesn't have to take it out for 30 days. The only way we will have to replace it is if he pulls it out, hence the band-aids on his face holding it in place. And let me tell ya, Colby is a regular Houdini when it comes to this tube, he did pull it out in the hospital a couple times, he's a sneaky guy. So we have socks on his hands so he can't grab it. When its time for Colby to grub, we take a small irrigation syringe and hook it up to the end of the ng tube. We take about 2CCs of air and push it through the tube via the syringe. Before we push out the air in the syringe we put our ear to his stomach, then we push out the air and listen for a "whoosh". When we hear the "whoosh" we know the tube is in the correct place. Then pull the air back out and we may procede with the feeding. We mix up a batch of his formula, heart defect babies need higher calorie formula. Then we warm it up and poor it into a feeding syringe. Its the large plastic tube hanging on the pole in this pic. Attached to the bottom of the syringe is a tube extension with a little piece that can stop the flow in the tube. We attach it to the pole via a velcro strap. Once its set with the formula and we've tested the tube placement, we hook Colby's NG tube to the plastic extension coming from the feeding syringe. Then we take the pump part of the feeding syringe and use that to get the formula flowing. The rest is done by gravity. If we hang it higher on the pole it moves faster, if we hang it lower, you get slower. Too fast, Colby pukes, too slow, you fall asleep watching it, so were always looking for that balance. Once he's done eating we disconnect the feeding syringe and clean it, then we push through about 2CCs of water through his ng tube to flush it, wait about 2 hrs and repeat. YUUMMMMY!