Haley Stewart: The Creator Who Set Up Her TPN Like a Birthday Cake, and 36.8 Million Watched
Haley Stewart has shown her followers how she eats since she was a teenager with a feeding tube; now the meal is a bag of TPN that runs into a line in her chest, and her set-ups have been watched tens of millions of times. She is a patient and a creator, not a clinician; this is her year of lines and tubes in her own words, with the research beside it.
Haley Stewart is a Montana creator in her early twenties who posts as @406_haley to roughly 1.3 million TikTok followers. Her bio names Ehlers-Danlos syndrome and POTS; her captions describe gastroparesis, a GJ feeding tube and, since the spring of 2025, total parenteral nutrition (TPN) through a Hickman central line, which she sets up on camera as "mukbangs". In 2026 she has posted a replaced line in May, a line and tube placement in June, an August surgery that left her with two tubes, an infected new site she named Frankie in September and, on October 6, a temporary fix until her surgical tube can be repaired. She sells feeding-tube pads and stickers through her Etsy shop, HaleysButtons. She is not a doctor, nurse or dietitian.
The video Haley Stewart posted on Tuesday, October 6, was filmed in a hospital room, and the caption did the explaining. “Thankfully this is only temporary until we can get my surgical tube fixed,” she wrote, and tagged it #hospital, #ehlersdanlos and #gastroparesis. It was the latest entry in a year told in captions: the central line replaced in May, the feeding tube placed in June, the August surgery that left her with two tubes instead of one, and the new one she introduced in September as Frankie. Stewart, who is in her early twenties and lives in Montana, posts as @406_haley to roughly 1.3 million followers on TikTok, most of whom found her through a format she made her own: setting up a bag of intravenous nutrition at night, in printed pajamas, with the care other creators give a plated dinner. She is a patient and a creator, not a nurse, a dietitian or a doctor.
October is Dysautonomia Awareness Month, the fourteenth annual campaign that Dysautonomia International has run since the first one in October 2012. Dysautonomia is the umbrella term for conditions in which the autonomic nervous system, the part that runs heart rate, blood pressure and digestion without being asked, malfunctions; POTS, which Stewart names in her bio next to Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, is one of them. “Been in this game of social media and posting on TikTok since I was 14,” she wrote on September 26. “Crazy how so many things can change over the years!”
The feeds: A girl with a feeding tube, making tubie things
The oldest videos that still pull viewers are from the summer of 2021, when she first set up her tube feeds on camera. “Happy Sunday everyone, set up feeds with me,” reads the one from September 19, 2021, viewed 7.6 million times. They live in a TikTok playlist called Setting up feeds, beside one called Camper remodel: fourteen posts that run from a supplies unboxing to “finished camper, I love it so much.”
The shop came even earlier. She opened HaleysButtons on Etsy in 2020, as a teenager with a GJ tube, a feeding tube placed through the skin of the abdomen into the small intestine. “Just a girl with a feeding tube making tubie things,” the shop’s About page says; she started it because she knew “the struggles of not finding cute and more mature looking tubie pads or clips.” Its reviews name feeding-tube and chronic-illness stickers and adhesive patches for glucose monitors, and this August she posted a drain bag she had made herself. When we read the shop on October 11, 2026, it listed 2,201 sales and a 5.0 rating across 422 reviews, and was on a break: a December 2025 note says her sticker machine “isn’t working correctly.”
The mukbangs: Dinner through a line in her chest
By the spring of 2025 a different bag had appeared. “Finally getting a good routine down,” she wrote on May 25, 2025, tagged #totalparenteralnutrition. Total parenteral nutrition, TPN, is a method of feeding that bypasses the gastrointestinal tract: a formula given through a vein that provides most of the nutrients the body needs, used when someone cannot be fed by mouth or by a tube into the gut, for weeks, months or for life, as MedlinePlus puts it. The vein is reached through a central line; hers is a Hickman, a tunneled catheter in the chest. Eighteen days earlier (our arithmetic), on May 7, 2025, she had gone septic. “1 year ago today I went septic and had 2 blood clots,” she wrote on the anniversary this May. “Thank you god for letting me be here one more year.”
The bag is the reason for the follower count. She tags the set-ups #mukbang, the name for videos of people eating large meals on camera, and treats the TPN as the meal. “Let’s set up my version of Chipotle,” reads one. There is an ocean bag with “the horribly drawn octopus” and a January post titled, accurately, “Lets eat but through my heart.” The one she posted on May 14, 2026, the week of her birthday, with “Let’s eat some Birthday Cake” on screen, had 36.8 million views when we read her grid on October 11, 2026. Pinned above them all is her updated “What is TPN” video, posted December 30, 2025, nearly nine minutes long, with 1.4 million views. “I know it’s long,” she wrote, “but it’s very good information!”
Watch this post on TikTok
The lines: A year of tubes, told in captions
The 2026 record is a sequence of procedures, each with a caption. On Thursday, May 28, she spent the day in interventional radiology having her central line replaced; “they are always so kind to me,” she wrote. The next day she went back to the hospital because something felt wrong: “Listen to your intuition you know your body the best.” On June 3 she posted from recovery after a Hickman line and a GJ tube were placed while she was asleep: “I’m so thankful I was alseep and didn’t feel anything.” In July the stitches holding her central line tore out again, “after just having it replaced not long ago,” and she added: “Disability doesn’t discriminate.” In August she was a bridesmaid at her cousin’s wedding with the GJ tube under the dress. “I definitely over did it,” she wrote, and was glad she could be there.
Surgery on Monday, August 31, was meant to simplify things and did not. “I have an extra site they tried to make, but had to stitch it up because it wouldn’t work,” she wrote, “along with my old site still being in and causing issues. I’m Going to have 2 tubes for a while before I can get it fixed.” Three weeks later she introduced the new one. “Everyone meet Frankie,” the September 22 caption begins; the site had become infected a week earlier, which meant the emergency room and IV antibiotics, and “it’s looking and feeling a lot better around the incision site.” Then came October 6 and the temporary fix.
Watch this post on TikTok
The post that explains why she accepts all of it came on October 1. “I honestly feel sick when I look back at videos or pictures of me severely malnourished,” she wrote, and at the same time she was “thankful to actually see how much that body needed the TPN as nutrition. Because my j tube feeds were failing.” In May she had posted about stretch marks from regained weight: “I’m not complaining about the weight gain I’m so thankful to have adequate nutrition!!” Her closing line was for other people: “skinny isn’t okay if you’re that severely malnourished.”
The honest parts: Burnout, a lost friend and a dentist
She does not post every day, and she says why. “The burnout can be exhausting when your brain and mind don’t let you ask for help,” she wrote in June, recovering from wisdom-tooth surgery. “It’s hard asking for help but some days we really just have to put our pride aside.” In the spring she lost a close friend, and she stepped back from posting for weeks at a time. The Ehlers-Danlos shows up in small, specific ways too: an August dental filling had to be abandoned because the numbing did not take. “I was feeling all the pain when they were drilling on my tooth,” she wrote. “Thanks EDS.” Her summary, from a 2024 post made with a PICC line in her arm, is six words long.
“Just gotta adjust to your normal.”
What the research actually measured: TPN, central lines and the EDS gut
Gastroparesis, also called delayed gastric emptying, is a disorder that slows or stops the movement of food from the stomach to the small intestine, the NIH’s digestive diseases institute (NIDDK) explains. It is not common, about 10 men and 40 women in every 100,000 people. For the most severe cases NIDDK’s treatment page lists a jejunostomy feeding tube and, when other treatments are not helping, parenteral nutrition, which it says may in some cases be long term. Stewart’s hashtags name gastroparesis, dysmotility and malabsorption; she has never posted a formal list of diagnoses, and this profile does not supply one.
The European nutrition society ESPEN’s 2016 guideline defines chronic intestinal failure as a long-lasting reduction of gut function below the minimum needed to absorb nutrients, water or electrolytes, “such that intravenous supplementation is required to maintain health,” calls it “the rarest organ failure” and names home parenteral nutrition as its primary treatment. The main hazard of that treatment is the line. A 2013 systematic review of 39 studies of adults on home TPN found catheter-related bloodstream infection rates of 0.38 to 4.58 episodes per 1,000 catheter days, a median of 1.31, with bacteria from human skin behind more than half of them: roughly one infection every two years of line time at the median (our arithmetic).
The gut and the connective-tissue diagnosis travel together more often than chance. In a Mayo Clinic review of 687 people with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, 56% had gastrointestinal manifestations; among the 76 whose gastric emptying was measured, 22.3% were abnormal, 11.8% delayed and 10.5% accelerated. In a separate Mayo study of 163 people with POTS, only 34% emptied their stomachs at a normal rate: 18% were delayed and 48% rapid. These are clinic cohorts, people referred because of symptoms, and they say nothing about any one person’s case. Our Inner Circle profile of Georgia McDermott covers gastroparesis, our Gastroparesis Awareness Month explainer covers how it is diagnosed, and Shay Haberstroh, also in the Inner Circle, lives with a port for intravenous support, short bowel syndrome, POTS and Ehlers-Danlos syndrome.
The disclosure map: Where her interests sit
Stewart earns from her content and her shop, and it is worth naming plainly. She runs HaleysButtons on Etsy. She posts in Roller Rabbit pajamas, tags the brand and has shared a discount code. Several posts are TikTok Shop videos marked gifted or shop content: Laura Mercier and r.e.m. beauty makeup, tape-in hair extensions, a pill cutter and Carpe deodorant. Her Linktree carries affiliate links for a Tangle fidget toy, Buoy hydration products and Grande Cosmetics, an Amazon storefront, and generic affiliate offers from meal kits and a vitamin subscription to language apps. She has a YouTube channel of eight Shorts. She is a patient-creator, not a doctor, nurse, dietitian or any kind of clinician, and none of the posts we read makes a treatment claim for any product. Gut Health Times has no commercial relationship with her or with Etsy, Roller Rabbit, TikTok Shop, Laura Mercier, r.e.m. beauty, Carpe, Tangle, Buoy, Grande Cosmetics or Amazon. This profile is educational, is not medical advice, and was prepared without input from her.