Happy 2025! Praise the Lord that my feeding tube is out and my esophageal stent is out. However, I’ve hit a snag.
Last summer the decision was made to yank (literally) the feeding tube out of my stomach in a five minute office procedure. The hole left by the tube closed up on its own within 24 hours. The body is truly amazing. At the time I still had the stent in my esophagus, but swallowing was going okay.
The second half of 2024 brought me intermittent bouts of coughing and stable swallowing conditions. My intuition told me the stent needed to come out, but there were no clear indicators when that would be appropriate and my doctors never directly answered that question when asked.
Unfortunately on New Year’s Eve, I went to the hospital with symptoms of respiratory infection. I had pneumonia and a 3cm lung abscess and spent the first 10 days of 2025 stuck in the hospital. To add insult to injury, the Oregon Ducks simply forgot how to play college football in the Rose Bowl. What the heck!?
While being treated for pneumonia by one team of doctors, residents and nurses, my gastroenterologist (GI) doctor was concerned something might be wrong with my stent. After conversing with him I asked if we could just take it out and see how I do for 30 days before putting a new one in. This was in line with his thinking so that’s what he did and I cried tears of joy upon waking from anesthesia.
Though happy to have the foreign object removed, swallowing still wasn’t going well. A speech pathologist administered a swallow test that revealed I’d developed a hole in my esophagus that allowed small amounts of anything I swallow to slide into the pleura around my lungs. Basically, the movement of the stent any time I coughed or swallowed in 2024, caused the clip holding the esophageal stent in place to tear a hole in the wall of my esophagus, thus causing my moderate case of pneumonia! This had been going on for weeks, maybe months.
Fortunately my GI doctor was responsive to these developments and was now feeling somewhat sheepish. He didn’t notice the hole when pulling the stent out. And no one picked up on it from the internal imaging. An effort was made to repair the hole while I was at the hospital, but my symptoms returned a few days later while recovering at home. I have been on the same liquid diet I was on while I had my feeding tube. Only this time I am swallowing by mouth. If I lean my body to the side that doesn’t have an esophageal hole, the liquid meal replacement formula goes down okay with minimal coughs and infiltration into my lungs.
I am now scheduled for an esophageal repair procedure with specialists in Seattle. I feel I am so close to the finish line. I am showing great restraint by not thumbing through all my recipe books in anticipation of returning to a solid food diet. But I dearly want this to be fixed. Acute care is a different animal than my long term focus on healing cancer. I’m thankful for stents, and tubes, and antibiotics, and procedures, but they are not without their challenges.
I’ve left out a lot of details in this one, but if you’ve made it this far, please pray. Pray for closure of my esophageal lining. For continued healing of the complicated nerves, muscles and tissues that make for a successful swallow. For a return to solid food that brings me so much joy and nourishment. For the antibiotics to continue to eradicate the pneumonia completely.
One funny: One nurse thought she would save time by doing her charting for a different patient while making a phone call for me while in my room. The person on the other line said, “Hi may I have the patient’s name and date of birth?”. My nurse read off the name and birthday of who she was charting for instead of me and I only noticed when I heard her say the year of the birthday as 1945! I was born in 1982.
I looked up and said “Really. 1945!? Do I look like I was born in 1945?”. I’m realizing that I run a little hot-blooded and the every-six-hour-IV antibiotic bag-change while in the hospital was getting to me. However, this snapped her out of it. We got it sorted, the nurse helped me order what I needed and we shared a laugh after the call.
Matt & Annie - Journey 