What an Oscar Contender Gets Wrong about Tube-feeding

Rose Byrne’s awards-season hit has a feeding tube at its centre. As a mother whose son relies on one, The Blend editor MELANIE DIMMITT needed to set the record straight.

It’s not every day that a Hollywood film features a feeding tube. But an indie-thriller that has seen Rose Byrne bag her first Golden Globe and, potentially, her first Oscar, also stars a gastrostomy (G) tube. 

In If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, Byrne plays Linda, a therapist whose young daughter is struggling with what appears to be Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder (ARFID). 

Unable to get sufficient calories through oral eating, Linda’s daughter – who remains nameless and, for the most part, faceless throughout the film – receives nightly tube feeds of nutritional formula through her G-tube, directly into her stomach. 

Much like the omnipresent beeps of her daughter’s feeding pump, Linda’s husband only offers unwanted noise, as a distant voice on the phone. The film opens with a burst water pipe creating an enormous hole in the roof of their bedroom. It’s chaotic from start to finish – and does an uncomfortably good job of capturing the challenges of raising a sick child as a sole parent, while also working, without the right supports in place.   

Where it goes wrong, however, is in portraying a feeding tube as a bad guy.  

My son, like Linda’s daughter, has a G-tube. He’s part of a community of about three million people globally who rely on enteral nutrition. A community that, for the most part, is represented negatively through anti-smoking ads, cancer pamphlets and, now, a film many reviewers are calling a horror. 

Yes, the story of a mother begging for help and not being heard has every right to be presented as horrific. Legs also shows the devastating consequences of a parent being failed by her child’s medical team. Which I can very much relate to. 

When my son started tube-feeding, the nutritional formula he was prescribed gave him uncontrollable reflux. Within weeks he was admitted to hospital, twice, with aspiration pneumonia – the exact thing we were trying to avoid by having his tube placed. 

My son’s medical team insisted that we had to “get the formula right” before we could experiment with giving him blended real food – pureéd versions of what he’d been eating before. So we followed instructions, which meant slowing down his tube feeds to the point where he was tethered to his feeding pump for most of the day. And things only got worse. 

At the six-week mark, to the sound of my son choking and spluttering, I took matters into my own hands. Taking advice from a fellow mother in the tube-feeding community, I blended up a chicken casserole, loaded it into a syringe and pushed it through his tube. I felt like I was breaking the law. But from there, everything changed. For five years since, my son has thrived solely on blended real food through his tube. 

So I get where Linda was at, in Legs, when she was driven to the point of disobeying doctors’ orders. In the final scenes of the film (spoiler alert) she dramatically rips out her daughter’s feeding tube. For what feels like an eternity, she extracts a thick tube the length of an Olympic-sized swimming pool.

And here is where the record really needs setting straight.

Your average G-tube has only a small portion, often just a few centimeters or less, extending inside the stomach. My son has a low-profile button variety that is very tidy and discreet, both inside and out. 

It also needs to be said that your average feeding pump does not beep the entire time it’s on. This maddening, unrelenting sound effect, much like the G-tube removal scene – which mimics a scarves-out-of-a-clown's-sleeve gag – is not true to life.

The film hijacks enteral nutrition as special effects, to fuel the flames of Linda’s turmoil.

Yes, tube-feeding comes with challenges. And feeding pumps do often beep more than one would desire. But as someone who supports their child to do it – and has spoken with dozens of other families, and people, who tube-feed – it’s sad to see it misrepresented by an otherwise brilliant and important film.

Conflating a jagged, gaping hole in a bedroom ceiling with a stoma opening in a child’s stomach causes real damage to society’s perception of tube-feeding. As does weaving a feeding tube into the surreal mayhem of Linda losing her mind.

A feeding tube is not a horror prop. Nor is it a symbol of parental failure, or a shorthand for madness. It’s a medical device that keeps people alive, helps bodies grow and gives families like mine a full and somewhat ordinary life.

A feeding tube has been a good guy in my son’s story – and that of countless others. So, as this film gets the accolades it deserves, let’s also give a nod to the hero it has cast as the villain.