AMY FISHER: If there was somebody in a wheelchair with no arms and no legs, you wouldn’t walk up to them
and go, “Why are you in that chair?’ Why do people feel the need to come up to me and assume that I am
anorexic? There needs to be more awareness for feeding tubes and the reasons why people have them.
AMY FISHER: Then I must pop a lid on.
AMY FISHER: That is ready to kind of be poured into my feed bag. So I’m at a point in my health where it’s just so
unstable. It’s so unpredictable where I can be fine one day and even the same day, within a few hours, being in the hospital.
AMY FISHER: I started getting problems with my health around 15/16. I was still in secondary school.
I was getting like a lot of pain in my legs and I went to a few doctors and they just kept saying it’s growing pains,
it’s growing pain.
AMY FISHER: I was getting palpitations where you can feel your heart beating. They kept saying, “Oh, it's just
anxiety, it’s just anxiety.” And then eventually I came to be diagnosed with POTS - Postural Orthostatic
Tachycardia Syndrome and it’s basically a heart condition.
I was diagnosed with Gastroparesis and then Ehlers Danlos.
AMY FISHER: That’s just going to prime all the air out of the line.
AMY FISHER: I just usually give around 10ml and I just do that slowly. So it doesn’t cause too much pain.
AMY FISHER: I have Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome Type 3 and that is a connective tissue disorder.
AMY FISHER: As far as dislocations go, I get them daily, multiple times a day - my fingers, shoulders and ankles
and knees are my most troublesome joints. Or if I leave the house, I’ll put my ankle supports on.
The collagen in my body, I have very little of it. So that’s basically a protein that holds all your joints together.
I crush them up with this tablet crusher, and then I just deliver them, mix them with some sterile water and then
deliver it down my tube with a syringe.
AMY FISHER: I lost a lot of weight very quickly and that point my doctor said to me,
“If you keep losing weight at this rate, we are going to have to intervene.”
AMY FISHER: I was trying supplement drinks and even with that,
I stopped tolerating them and I couldn’t keep my weight up.
BRUCE FISHER: When Amy first started to lose weight, I was a little bit concerned. I did think it was an eating
disorder. I really thought that was the case. But realising later on, after talking to her that, that it wasn’t.
AMY FISHER: I got a feeding tube because I have Gastroparesis which means my stomach is paralysed
and it doesn’t empty food properly. So when food goes in, it can’t digest.
AMY LEE FISHER: Okay, guys I have to be really, really quiet because it is half two in the morning. I have been
sick about two times, just sitting here in the past ten minutes.
AMY LEE FISHER: I vomit basically when I eat but it can be hours and hours and hours after eating like,
the food will just sit there and sit there and sit there. That causes like extreme pain, extreme nausea, general
like, bloating, discomfort that kind of thing. It’s really sore like, that’s my hip bone that’s usually really, really
prominent and it’s now like, non-existent. My feeding tube stays in 24/7. I have got no other source of getting
my nutrition. I depend on it. I rely on it. It keeps me alive.
AMY LEE FISHER: The feed is ready to be connected. So I just connect that like that and then I just press ‘run’ on
my pump and then you can probably hear the pump. It’s going to start delivering the feed into my tube basically.
It can get uncomfortable if I do a lot of talking or laughing because it moves around your throat all the
time. It does cause pain, especially in my nose.
AMY LEE FISHER: Having something there all the time and rubbing against like, your insides, it causes like,
blisters in your throat.
AMY LEE FISHER: I eat and drink by mouth most days. I try to drink orally as much as I can because I don’t want
my stomach to just pack up and stop working completely. My family is sitting down for a meal;
I would just have a very small portion, I would just try my best because even if I am sick, there will be a very small
amount of that meal that I will digest and that’s better than nothing.
And, you know, if I don’t then how am I going to know if I am getting better?
TOM HARRIS: I suppose it’s sort of, like having a little newborn baby. You got to prepare for anything,
‘I've gotta take that with me. I've gotta take that with you,’ sort of thing.
AMY LEE FISHER: I get a lot of stares from the public. You would be surprised how many people say little
comments or point. If it’s a small child, I will just be like, ‘Yeah, okay! You know, they are young. They don’t
understand.’ But when it’s an adult, I would expect them to have a bit more respect. And if I have to vomit in
public, a lot of people assume that I have an eating disorder. I have had many, many people say things like,
‘Why do you do that to yourself? That’s disgusting like, just eat. It’s not that hard.’ And just silly comments like
that. It’s not an eating disorder, my stomach is paralysed and it doesn’t work, unfortunately.
AMY LEE FISHER: I have a lot of days where I don’t want to go out and it becomes very difficult when you have got
a feeding tube on your face to hide it. There is currently no cure. Things might improve but they haven’t.
But at the moment, I am actually working with my team of doctors to get a Gastric Pacemaker which basically is
essentially like a pacemaker for your heart except it’s for your stomach and it’s meant to stimulate digestion.
AMY LEE FISHER: When I was getting my first feeding tube, the first place I went was YouTube and I typed in.
I was like you know, ‘What is a feeding tube?‘ And then I was like, ‘You know what? I am going to do that because
there is going to be another me that comes along and wants to know about this. And if I can help just one
person, then that’s amazing.’
AMY LEE FISHER: ‘Hey, guys! Welcome back to my channel. How I kind of, deal with people staring at my
face. How to remove an NG Tube.’ I get hundreds of comments from people saying, ‘You have inspired me.’
But I think really they don’t realise that they are inspiring me too.
AMY LEE FISHER: Being able to help people and I read these comments and it just, you know, it lifts my spirit
and it keeps me in a good place mentally. And I couldn’t imagine not having that there as a support system now.
BRUCE FISHER: What I admire most about Amy, even though she is going through all these dramas,
it really doesn’t impact on her at all. Some restrictions obviously but apart from that stuff she knows she can’t
do, it doesn’t stop her from doing anything.
AMY LEE FISHER: A lot of people think that you can’t do things with the feeding tube like you can’t swim, you can’t
shower but that is not the case. You can do everything anyone else can do.
There is nothing that you can’t do with a feeding tube.
AMY LEE FISHER: I am going to try and live my life as much as I can to the best of my abilities. But I have just,
kind of, got to go a different way about it you know, take a different road than say the average person.