[A makeshift clothes line made by tying yarn up on a bookshelf. Clipped to it are three cloth circles. One is a yellow cat on a black background, another is light brown owls on a light green background, and the last is blue flowers on a white background.]
I don't normally advertise products here, but I thought anyone using a feeding tube might be interested in these things. They are called Trendie Tubies. They are absorbent cloth pads, in a variety of styles, designed to be used around the opening of your feeding tube once it's healed enough to stop needing the kind of dressings you might need right after the surgery.
I absolutely love them. They're absorbent, they're comfortable, they don't feel anything as awful as having dressings taped to your skin. They're very soft. And they have all kinds of neat designs. My favorite is the owls. Here is a picture of what they look like when they're being used:
[Photo of a Trendie Tubies thing with blue flowers, on a GJ tube over light skin with blue clothes surrounding it.]
They have a little Velcro thing you can't see, so they can fit around all different sizes and kinds of tubes.
Here's what their About page says, so I don't end up paraphrasing it:
Trendie Tubies Accessories are hand crafted by a Mother-Daughter Duo.
All items are handcrafted and not mass produced so each item is unique and will not be uniform.
Trendie Tubies are a comfortable & absorbent machine washable pad that helps with the leakage that is common with G-tubes,
J-tubes and GJ-tubes. They work for both button tubes and peg tubes and even trach's!
Each Trendie Tubie Accessory is approximately 2 3/4 inches round and made up of 3 layers of fabric sewn together.
-The top layer is a soft flannel with a cute design of your choice.
-The middle layer is cotton terry cloth to absorb any moisture and leakage.
-The bottom layer is fleece for a soft comfortable feeling next to the skin preventing irritation and granulation tissue.
-They have a small Velcro tab for easy closure and are double zig-zag stitched to minimize fraying edges.
All materials have been pre-washed.
Allergy Alert – We have an extended family of dogs, cats & horses…be aware just in case allergies are a concern.
We strive for 100% customer satisfaction.Your comments & feedback are always appreciated.
Here's a link to the Trendie Tubies website, where you can buy them.
I bought one for every day of the week. Three owls, two cats, two flowers. I can't recommend them highly enough. And I'm posting this because, as far as I know, most people haven't heard of things like this. The VNA wanted me using gauze dressings the rest of my life, which I really didn't want. They say they're machine washable but we've been hand washing them because it's more convenient, then hanging them up on the bookcase to dry.
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Ballastexistenz 
Coolness — thanks for sharing. I don’t have a feeding tube, but if at some point I ever need one, I hope I remember that these exist. I like the owls too (reminds me of Harry Potter!) :)
Those are really neat! :) I think the owl ones are my favorite.
“Then hanging them up on the bookcase to dry.” So they’re literate, too!
Amanda–
This is unrelated to the above post. Not sure how else to contact you; sorry about that. I was wondering if you might be willing to link to my autism memorial site, so that it can get more exposure.
The idea of the memorial is to gather profiles of people who died because of prejudice against autistic people. There are other sites which do the same thing, mostly with lists of names; I’ve used the information I can find to gather the names from multiple sources, create individual memorial pages for each person, and cite references.
Site is here (trigger warning for abuse, institutions, ablist/racist/homophobic prejudice).
http://autism-memorial.livejournal.com/
Right now I have 127 profiles, and I’m learning how to do better research so that I can get a more complete picture of the problem. My main blog (http://chaoticidealism.livejournal.com/) gets some traffic, but I know yours gets a lot more, and I am very frustrated with how little attention these cases get. I deliberately don’t name the murderers; they get enough publicity as it is, often much more than their victims. Especially for deaths in institutions, sometimes the only evidence I can find that the person even existed is a years-old news article with very little detail. I think that’s unfair. I think people deserve to be remembered.
I don’t know what your policy is on linking to somebody else’s site. I know some people avoid it because it’s hard to predict what somebody else will say, and other people will assume you endorse it. However, if it is something you’d like to do, I’d appreciate it. I’m going to keep the memorial mostly non-political, focusing on the people who died, trying to keep them from being forgotten. Sometimes I’ll comment on a case, but I’ll do that mostly on my main blog.
If you do post it, attach trigger warnings, just in case. The memorials do talk about how these individuals died, and I do not want people to get flashbacks on my account.
Sorry about commenting on your blog post instead of e-mailing you. I didn’t have an e-mail. So I guess you can just delete this once you’ve read it and decided one way or the other.
Lisa Daxer