Food. 
I think about it ALL the time. Not because I’m hungry but because my Little is not.
Don’t get me wrong, 9 times out of 10 he will eat chocolate if given the chance, or sweets. And fairly often he will ask for crisps or chips, or even a crumpet. But half way through that crumpet, he is full. If I were to push (when he was younger), he would continue to try eating and vomit.
We do not know why he does not get hungry, and doctors haven’t even begun to listen to me about that aspect of his feeding difficulty. They are stuck at the gut – is it too slow, is it diseased? (Maybe, and no are the answers to those questions)
My reality is that he is eleven years old and has been utterly reliant on tube feeding since he was 8 months old. I am a tubie mum veteran.
I have ridden the waves of vomit using the various and wondrous concoctions given to him by the pharmaceutical companies (excuse me, the dietitians, who aren’t one little bit biased by those companies – no they’re not!). I have seen him fade away into nothingness and look a ghastly mixture of grey and yellow. I have watched as doctor followed nurse, followed doctor try to stick a cannula into a vein in order to rehydrate him. Knowing that they needed to stop sticking him with needles, knowing that we were creating trauma, and knowing that they could not stop because with every moment that passed, he needed fluid more, and with every moment that passed his dry little body was narrowing his veins.
I have stood against the medics, taken my gut instincts into my hands, learned more than any mother should ever need know about food, and calories, and fats and proteins and vitamins and minerals and digestion, and I have advocated for that child. I have watched a dietitian write in bold red letters: Mother going against medical advice.
And I have made that Little food, and blended it and sieved it and worked and worked to get enough goodness into the tiniest volume so that his body would not reject it.
I have spent each and every day of the past ten years feeding him every two or three hours, and overnight. We have a magic pump that allows me to sleep, and feeds him drip by drip so that the precious liquid stays inside, and hopefully translates to growth and energy. I have been up more times that I can remember to deal with the various alarms that pump gives off. Now, each time I hear that beep when out and about, my heart starts pumping and my body stands to attention. It takes a few minutes to realise that mine is not the attention being screamed for, that the pump in question is another child’s.
I make Little’s food every day or two. I have a recipe, but I question myself ALL the time. Do I need to rethink it, to recalculate? Have I missed something, should I be doing more, has his growth been enough to justify a change?
I think about food ALL the time.
I am not part of a team. We have doctors and nurses, and wonderful school teachers, and they largely follow my lead. I have no dietitian. Yet. I have no one to work with, to figure out a way forward.
Because this is an odd situation. The general consensus of “they” is that he will one day be tube free. He is mobile and intelligent and there is no physical reason that we can find to explain the need of tube feeding. So no medic will say or write that Little is “tube fed” in a permanent manner. I struggle to get them to acknowledge “for the foreseeable future”. In spite of tube weaning failure on a number of occasions.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not looking for a doom laden approach. But if he is one day to be tube free, we should have a team. It should include me. It should also include professionals who have experience in this area – the psychology of tube weaning is what has me ranting today, so a psychologist; a dietitian; a doctor. And as a team we should make a plan. I know that plan A is very unlikely to work, but as Eldest’s head of care wrote to me this week,
“If Plan A doesn’t work, then we’ll move to Plan B, then C, then D, then E and so on until we find a plan that works”
I have no plan. I do not have the ability, experience or knowledge to make a plan, and as Little’s mother I am the last person able to put any plan into practice. Most people will understand that mother and pre-adolescent coming head to head on such issues is a recipe for disaster.
Little hates his tube food.
Little hates thinking about food.
Little hates the feeling of his stomach filling.
Little fights me whenever food comes up – so breakfast, snack, lunch, snack, dinner. Whining, shouting, screaming.
I can avoid some fights when it comes to oral food. I make it his choice, but then he is miserable because even if his stomach is not hungry, his mouth is and he does not know what he feels like, and cannot find anything to satisfy that feeling. I suspect he feels failure too.
How can I avoid the fights about tube food? That is what keeps him healthy and alive.
He HATES tube food. It’s boring, it takes too long (about 3 minutes), there’s no point, it doesn’t do him any good. And anyway, he’s in hospital “all the time” as it is, so it wouldn’t make any difference if he was ill. He’s tired all the time, so it wouldn’t make any difference if he didn’t eat.
This is the discourse he proclaims. The confusion, misunderstanding, frustration, anxiety and anger are growing as he is getting older.
We should have had a team years ago. Years. Ago. Specifically to avoid This.
I am patient. My children have taught me not to raise my voice. They have taught me to accept their emotions, both bad and good. But I find myself raising that voice when Little screams at me that I am mean and stinky and evil because I want to feed him.
Short update today…
Simple Tangles 