If you want to sustain and nourish your body through your veins here's how it works:
TPN sustains me, allegedly. Total Parenteral Nutrition is the laboratory name of the mixed bag of nutritional fluids that filter into me. The therapeutic solution is pumped by a battery-operated machine through an umbilical cord of plastic tubing — a PICC line — that has been inserted into a vein in my left triceps and runs into my chest, where it doles out the soup. I run the TPN pump fourteen hours a day, plus there's another four hours of medicinal octreotide and saline solution dripping from bags hung on an IV pole. Our peaceful bedroom has been stocked like an infirmary. The same minirefrigerator that sat in a corner of my college dorm room, stuffed with Michelob and hash brownies, is now stuffed with bladders and vials of thiamine, folic acid, famotidine, and insulin — the ingredients that fortify TPN. TPN is complex. And expensive. The 3,000-milliliter bag of solution, a slippery five-pound load constituted of a base formula of dextrose, Travasol, Intralipid, selenium, chromium chlore, and a dozen other chemical essentials, runs $800.
In no way can TPN be confused with actual eating. Pulling on rubber gloves and laying out potions and needles on beds of sterile wipes across my living-room table, I feel more like Owsley Stanley producing kitchen-clean LSD for the Merry Pranksters than the passable cook I used to be.
All the moving parts and the TPN feed bag reside in a backpack, slung over my shoulder like a nylon hump. The programmable pump is about the size of a jumbo foundry brick and weighs as much as two. The pump's motor, scarcely muffled by the backpack's casing, grinds in continuous cycles of whirs and clicks, parsing the thin white stream of medical milk juicing me from 4:00 P.M. to 6:00 A.M. My freighted movement from bed to toilet to living-room couch is accompanied by a continuous-loop soundtrack, and the ceaseless engine racket is a loud party to conversation, television watching, sleeping. Often, I am humiliated into leaving the room.
As I get pumped on the overnight shift, the groaning backpack rests on a night table next to my pillow, tying me down in a single position in bed. When I roll over in my sleep, I am awakened by gear crashing to the wood floor. But I don't often sleep long enough to roll over, as hourly my bladder fills to bursting and I wake, dragging the pump to the bathroom. The endocrinologist who cooked up the TPN routine says that's just the way my body is reacting. Everybody's different, and there's "nothing to be done." I haven't slept more than an hour straight since the surgery.
Food never did this to me.
Read more: http://www.esquire.com/features/chrons-disease-diet-0909-2#ixzz0PcwB7IRV