That sounds awful. The NG is miserable, but it’s worth it; it will decompress the stomach and suck up all the fluid you’re making that you can’t pass yet. It buys time so that the gut further down can finally move along whatever is stuck. Partial small bowel obstructions (PSBO) are not life threatening, just miserable. When you’re vomiting, though, it can be a complete obstruction, and it’s better to let them do what they need to. Usually if you’re obstructed, the loops of bowel before the obstruction will be blown up like a balloon on abdominal x-rays (because everything is stuck up to that point and can’t pass). Sometimes that is harder to see; it’s easier when we don’t have a colon.
Without the NG, and with the obstruction, you have stomach acid and bile building up, and it adds to the pain and the misery. If you have really bad nausea and are still not passing gas or stool from below, might want to try it. It’s kind of miserable and annoying to have it put down, but the feeling of having all that muck drained from your stomach without having to vomit is a good one.
With a complete obstruction, the blockage can kill the bowel, like Erica experienced. When the bowel is unable to move food along, and it is building up like a dam on the inside, it can block blood flow from moving through the outer layers, as the bowel gets stretched. Then it tries to die in places, turns black if it gets that far. Then it can rupture, and that is deadly.
Like others on this site, I have been fairly traumatized by all that I have experienced in hospitals as a patient. But if they think you need to have surgery to lyse adhesions, they can sometimes do it via scope, and that’s easier on you. If things have gone too far, though, and the bowel is damaged by the obstruction, you would need open surgery.
I spent a year and a half with a leaking pouch that nobody could diagnose correctly (mostly for lack of effort). I had to beg for an MRI, which of course showed the problem clearly (rampant peritonitis from chronic pouch leak, causing my pain and diarrhea for so long). By the time it was found and I had a surgeon willing to treat me, my jejunum (middle part of small intestine) was encased badly in scar tissue. He didn’t know that when he did my diverting ileostomy, but he saw it while he was scoping, and ended up having to open and take out a huge block of small bowel that was in so much scar that he described it as ‘like concrete’.
It isn’t worth losing that small bowel. Let them do the surgery sooner rather than later, if they tell you it’s needed. I wish someone had figured out what was going on much sooner in my own case, when that much small intestine could have been saved. I’d probably still be able to work if that had been done.
Instead, I lost my work and my life changed for the worse in many ways. Sooner, the adhesions forming from the infection could have been released without removing more bowel, the infection itself treated, and the pouch repaired. Since it was so far out, though, from when it started, I ended up with a revision to an S-pouch (didn’t have enough slack left for a J), am missing a lot of important jejunum (where critical nutrients are absorbed), and have a much harder time/worse function than when I had the J-pouch. The revision further shortened my ileum, and the loss of length in the jejunum means much looser and more painful stools, and on top of it all, I had an injury to the nerves controlling the internal sphincter during the revision, so I can’t control it when I need to go. I don’t absorb minerals well, and the deficiencies are irritating and painful (I get muscle cramps easily from Mg deficiency, and skin problems from Zn deficiency, so I have to supplement those in high doses and hope they absorb). I don’t absorb enough of the medicine that I’m supposed to be on for my RA. It’s a lot harder to lose small bowel than colon, and still function well, in my experience!
Best of luck. I hope it all resolves soon with just the tube…
