ER Trip

A few days ago I got to make the trip to the hospital that nobody with a tube wants to make; a trip with a clogged tube. Now how the tube got clogs is kind of a funny story you see I had been at the hospital several days before to have to tube looked at and to have the three anchors that hadn't fallen off taken off by on of the nice G-tube nurses. While I was at that appointment I had said something about not being able to get the formula gunk out of the beginning of my tube near the port. So the nurse went and got some long handled q-tips and showed me how to clean the excess formula out of the tube with that.
So two days later on Wednesday my tube had a bunch of formula gunk in the same spot so I got one of the long handled q-tips and went to work on cleaning, now I though while I had the q-tip in my tube in the first place that it would be ok to take my time to thoroughly clean out my tube, well I was wrong because all of a sudden the was some sort of suction that sucked the cotton part of the q-tip off of the handled lodging it in my tube. So now not only was my tube clean but it was clogged. My mom and I tried to get that cotton piece out everyway we could think to try. We tried sucking it out with on of the big 60 ml syringe, we tried digging it out with a bent paperclip, but it seemed no matter what we did the cotton tip was still lodged tightly into my tube.
This is the time my mom decided it is now the time to call the hospital's ER and try and get the on call GI doctor to tell us what to do. She called and somehow get routed to the on call interventional radiologist instead, which is the person who would change my GJ tube had the need arise for it to be changed early or they would change it every 3 to 6 months on a schedule. My mom tells the radiologist what had happen and she said not to come in Wednesday night because they would just admit me until morning but that she would have one of the interventional radiologists working the next day call my house and set up a time to see me and try and get the cotton part out or change my tube.
Thursday morning the radiologist called at the start of her shift and by 10:30 we where there admitted to the hospital and in the Radiology department. I was put in the Interventional Radiology waiting and prep area while they cleaned a room for me to go into. Before they took me into the room to take some pictures to get a better look at how and where my tube was inside my body the radiologist came in to look at my tube. This is when she had an idea, she told us that she had seen some tiny eye surgery hooks down in the OR that she thought would be able to go down into my tube and get the cotton tip out. She called down to the OR to have one brought up when child life had heard I was in the hospital and decided to stop by. Now, I'm at the hospital a lot so I know most of the child life specialists who work there so it's always like catching up with old friends when I come in to a different part of the hospital where a different child life person works and Thursday was just like that. We talked about how my tube had moved from my nose to my belly and how not even a two weeks into having it, it was already clogged. We where all laughing when the radiologist came in with the eye surgery hook.
The doctor opened my tube and went to work, trying to dig the cotton out of my tube while the nurse, the child life specialist, my mom, and I waited holding our breath because it was going to be much better on me if the doctor could get the cotton out rather than changing the whole tube and leaving me more open to infection. Around five minutes later the radiologist accidently yanked on my tube, which hurt, but that was all it took to help her get the cotton out of my tube. The crisis was fixed by a doctor who could think outside of the box and one small painful pull on my tube.