The J Tube, Blended Diet, and Food Safety

I posted this a few days ago on Junior's regular blog and thought I would also post it here.
Answering the most common question/concern I get when I talk about the blended diet being given through the J tube.

Quite a few people do the blended diet through the G tube and this way it can be given bolus. Very few do the diet through the J tube so I get a lot of questions about how we are accomplishing this. One thing I am asked about most frequently is food safety so I thought I would do a post about it. Giving feeds through the J tube means food must be given slowly through a feeding pump over a long amount of time. Junior is on his feeding all night so it would certainly not be safe for many foods to be out of the fridge for that amount of time. I also don't want to be getting up every hour during the night to rinse out and refill his feeding bag. Here is how we handle that problem.
I took a regular size back pack(would love to find a full size insulated back pack so if you spot one let me know) added a velcro loop, inside near the top, to hold the feeding bag.
I add a small slit to the bottom to thread the tube so it can attach to the pump.
Junior has one of his medications shipped to us and it is packed in these re-freezable ice bricks.
They are prefect and will stay frozen for up to 12 hours if you use several. I put each one in a zip lock bag. I then place 2 behind the feeding bag, one on either side, and one in the front pocket of the back pack.
This makes for a fairly heavy back pack to hang on the IV pole but we have had no problems with it. The food stays plenty cold and is just the right temp by the time it goes from the pump to Junior(and it stays cold all night). All that ice sweats quite a bit so I keep a cloth over the top of the feeding pump and also tape a piece of split gauze over the "in" tube on the pump. Don't want water getting into the pump and causing issues.
I keep two back packs available because they do get damp from the ice and need to be washed every few days.
During the 2-3 hours Junior is on the pump during the day we are able to use the mini back pack that came with the pump. It can only hold one ice pack so can not keep things cold over night.
Another thing we do if Junior is going to be off the pump more then a half hour during the night is back flush the line. I flush the line going into Junior's tube and then clamp the feeding line. I then take the tubing out of the pump pinch it so fluid can go up into the pump bag and then push about an ounce or so of water backwards through the line. This means food is not sitting in the line with the risk of it going bad. Junior at times needs treatments during the night and it would be dangerous for any food to sit in the line for the hour or more it takes for his treatments.
So now you know more then you ever wanted to know about how we deal with that tricky food safety and the J tube question.