How are you doing? Have you seen anyone yet? Colleen asked if I wanted to join this conversation but all I know about openings if that when they took out my husband's trach, it did not fill in like they expected and he ended up having it closed in the hospital. It wasn't a problem and healed well. I don't expect that my husband will get to eliminate his feeding tube but I suspect that it would require surgery to fill in as well. There were issues with his tube until doing some research, we got a gastroenterologist to switch it from a balloon type and went with a bumper button type of feeding tube . The tube clicks on for feeding and off the rest of the time. No more 4 am visits to the ER to have a replacement and I rinse out the tube after every feeding. I use a piston irrigation syringe for feeding 4 times a day and it takes about 20 minutes for each feeding.