A Tender Mercy

Remember this picture?  This is the feeding pump I talked about before.  We've been having major problems with it lately.  It likes to wake us up in the middle of the night with a high-pitched alarm that indicates an error message.  It has been doing this more and more often for the last month or so and I've been trying to put off doing anything about it.  We tried cleaning it with the air compressor and my husband even took it apart and cleaned the motor--he's good at that kind of stuff.  And it worked most of the time.  And to be fair, it's had a hard life living at our house, getting dropped and being used basically 24/7 every day of the year.

But last week it happened again in the middle of the night and it was really disruptive to our sleep--especially since we couldn't get it to start working again.  In the morning I prayed about it and got a clear impression that I needed to do something about it.  I called my insurance and found out that they weren't going to cover any rental or purchase of a new pump because they purchased the pump for us less than 5 years ago.  Then I found out that a rental pump would cost $25/day and a new pump would cost about $845.  I also found out that repair would take a couple of weeks and might not be worth it.  We decided to try to find out more about "bolus feeds" which go faster than the feeding pump and uses gravity to push the formula in.  We used to do it when our daughter had an NG tube but we didn't know how to do it with the G tube.  Plus, the syringe we used back then to hold the formula was only 2 ounces and we had to hold it for the whole feeding (and it frequently spilled).  We give her 8 ounces at a time and holding a 2-ounce syringe did not seem like a good option.

So I started hunting around on the web for bolus feeding supplies.  After a short time hunting around, a post from a blog came up on Google that told how to convert the bags we already use with our feeding pump into bolus feeding bags.  It's really easy to change the bags and it was EXACTLY the answer I needed.  We tried it that night and it worked perfectly.

That night I realized what a tender mercy that was.  First, I got the impression to do something about the problem.  Then, after I had looked at all our options, I was directed to the website that told me how to solve our problem.  I have to give Heavenly Father credit for helping me so much.  That's happened a lot in the last five years with all the health problems we've had with our daughter.  She still has health problems and they aren't going away, but when I need to get help, I can usually find it.