NG tubes that can sense when your stomach is empty?

[Lakrisa, STNA]

My boyfriend's mother was recently admitted to the hospital for a paralytic ileus. She was diagnosed with Crohn's Disease several months back and just recently started receving radiation treatments for cancer, which the doctor's believe most likely caused the exacerbation of her Chrohn's, leading to the paralytic ileus. Anyways, they had her NG hooked up to low continuous suction to remove that bowel contents that were backing up into her stomach. While we were there visiting one day, I noticed that we sat there for over 2 hours and nothing moved through the tubing into the suction cannister. There was even quite a bit of bowel contents sitting in the tubing not being moved through. I checked the wall suction and it was turned on, but it was not sucking. When I notified the nurse of this, all she did was look at the wall suction and say it's on, it's just on low. Another hour or so went by and still nothing moved through the tube, so I called the nurse back in again. She then proceeded to tell me that if the stomach is empty, the suction automatically goes on standby to prevent destruction of the stomach lining. This made no sense to me since there is no way for the end of the NG tube to sense when the stomach is empty. She never checked placement, flushed the tube to make sure it wasn't clogged, or anything. Does someone know something about this that I don't know, because I am under the impression that an NG tube hooked up to low continous suction should constantly suck unless the tubing is clogged or it has sucked up against the wall of the stomach.

[XB9S, BSN, MSN, EdD, RN, APN]

Because this is not related to a patient and is related to a matter of a personal nature it would be inappropriate for any of us here to give you an answer.

I suggest you speak to the nurse manager for clarification

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