How to drain a g port of a GJ tube

I am on several feeding tube pages and see this question asked frequently, so I figured I would write out what we do...

First off we do it differently for Jillian and Lydia. This is because of their needs. Jilli only needs to be drained overnight. We don't get much out most days but she sleeps worse and vomits if she is not drained overnight so even though it is a really small amount it makes a big difference for her. Lydia on the other hand must be drained 24/7 otherwise she vomits. She can not handle anything in her stomach.

What is draining? Draining the g port of a GJ tube drains the stomach contents out of the stomach. Some kids with a gj tube never need it, some only sometimes and others all of the time. You should NEVER drain a J port. Also talk to a doctor before you start draining, because of how much Lydia drains in a day we give her Pedialyte to replace electrolytes she looses, because Jillian drains so little we don't have to do that.  

How do we drain?

Jillian: We use a urine leg bag to drain her into. This makes it easier to measure and drains slower then it does to open air. For Jillian this works. We connect the leg bag to a bolus extension and then the extension to her g port. Just always double check that the drainage bag is closed... otherwise you might get the fun of stepping in a pile of stomach goo...

Lydia: Lydia doesn't do as well draining to a leg bag so she drains into a diaper. We still use the bolus extension just because it is handy to only have one kind of g extension but any of the g extensions would work fine. We tightly wrap the diaper around the tube and then connect the tube to the g port. We change the diaper a few times a day depending on how full it gets. While most of our insurance companies have covered the leg bags Jillian uses (our DME says our current insurance company does not have a billing code so they can't bill for them so we can't currently get them) however diapers are not covered by insurance for this purpose. I laughed because when Lydia first started draining into preemie diapers there was typically one to two packs on the shelf at our Target and now they have seemed to up their order... I think we are skewing the preemie diaper market in our area! We go between 3-8 preemie diapers a day! 

Urine leg bag and an AMT bolus extension for g port of G-Jet feeding tube