Mikie is sitting up and the NG tube is out once more. I think this time he will be ok. It’s not necessarily a good thing to keep sucking the juices out of your tummy, you have to give it a chance to go down on its own. I think it is improving and I’ll go ahead and tell you why. I’d love to talk to a GI-doc to find out if my thinking is correct. This may be more detailed then you want so you might want to skip the rest of this post, and if you keep reading don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Stuff has been coming out of both ends of Mikie the last few days. The text book says that the stomach secrets lots of gastric juice at each meal. I don’t know what it does when no food is place in it, like in Mikie’s case, but it appears to be putting out plenty, maybe because of the presence of food in the jejunum. The liver produces bile which is stored in the gall bladder. It contains acids that help further break down the food as it enters the deudenum (first part of the small intestine). It also contains pigments from old blood cells. (Haven’t you wondered where old blood cells went?) And now you know the answer to the never asked trivia question, “what makes poop brown?”
You think that was bad, stick around it gets worse. A few days ago the NG tube (going into the stomach via the nose) was drawing mostly brown liquid, likely bile. What was coming out the other end was mostly yellow, much like the color of his liquid diet. Yesterday the juices coming up from the stomach were dark green, likely gastric juices and the stuff coming out the bottom end was much darker in color and very loose. That tells me that the bile is moving down. Now to get the large intestine back up and working like it should to draw that water out and into the body. It’s now 7 PM and he hasn’t thrown up or acted like he would all day. He was coughing a while ago to clear his lungs and I was able to suction some snot out. (Oh, after all the descriptiveness so far I’m sure you can handle a little snot!) In the process I made him gag a little (kind of like you are now) and if he didn’t upchuck with that then I think he is doing pretty well.
