Micheal, I still have my PEG and haven't noticed any other limitations. As Steve says, it sticks out of your stomach and it takes a little while to get used to it being there but other than that it's not intrusive. The swimming thing is really the only limitation I know of.

FWIW, on the "to PEG or not to PEG" question, I was told at Dana Farber that if I did radiation with concurrent chemo (cisplatinum), they *required* that their patients get the PEG before starting. If I was to choose not to have the chemo, then they left the decision about the PEG up to the patient and just kept an eye on them.

There's good reason for this distinction if you read the New England Journal of Medicine studies that show how effective concurrent chemo is, one of the big differences between groups (rad with chemo or without chemo) in acute symptoms is the degree of mucositis that they experienced during treatment. Statistically it is simply much more likely, with chemo, that the mucositis will be so bad that you can't swallow, or can only swallow with extreme difficulty, at some point during treatment.

If you look at the signatures of those who made it through without a PEG who post here, many (most?) of them had rad but no chemo. I think that's worth being aware of in this debate.

Nelie