The way to a man's heart is through his stomach - Roger Ebert's Journal

As an aficionado of industrial design, I find the G-tube admirable. A small tunnel is opened above the belly button and leads directly into the stomach. Food passes through the tube. I dine. No fuss, no muss.
In earlier years I would have found this idea horrifying. Not so much now that I need it to stay alive. Invention is the child of necessity. In this invention, common sense was more important than genius. The Egyptians first hit upon the notion of tubes for feeding people centuries ago.

I learn on this site "the ancient Egyptians used reeds and animal bladders to supply patients with a mix of wine, chicken broth and raw eggs." Indeed, "after President James Garfield was shot in 1881, he stayed alive for 79 days on a mix of beef broth and whiskey."

I am one of about 350,000 Americans with a feeding tube. You probably know one of us. Six times a day, a can of liquid food is dripped into me from a plastic bag on a pole. It takes maybe 15 minutes. I continue to write, read, or watch TV. My care-giver Millie Salmon performs the process so easily that sometimes, half an hour later, Chaz will ask me if I've eaten and I'm honesty unable to say.

The sight of me eating in this way is presumed to be offensive. At film festivals Chaz or Millie will squirrel me away in a private place. On airplanes I go into the toilet and use a syringe to feed myself. In a dispassionate analytical sense, a discreet G-tube is more subtle than someone chomping their way down on an ear of corn or sliding a doubled-up pizza wedge in sideways, but believe me, it isn't nearly as much fun.

Chaz and Millie buy raw vegetables and steam them a little and put them into a juicer. They must be liquid enough to run through the tube. Millie loves to recite long lists of the veggies in my supplementary mix, but they're all the same to me. She goes berserk at the produce counter. There's a web site online encouraging the use of "live food," and I'm sure it's good for my health. But the bottom line remains the canned stuff. I've lived on it in one version or another since the summer of 2006, and my doctor has a patient who has prospered for 30 years this way.

More ...

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2011/05/the_way_to_a_mans_heart_is_thr.html