如何在SQL 2000中对NTEXT查询的结果使用sp_xml_preparedocument？

I know NTEXT is going away and that there are larger best-practices issues here (like storing XML in an NTEXT column), but I have a table containing XML from which I need to pluck a attribute value. This should be easy to do using sp_xml_preparedocument but is made more tricky by the fact that you cannot declare a local variable of type NTEXT and I cannot figure out how to use an expression to specify the XML text passed to the function. I can do it like this in SQL 2005 because of the XML or VARCHAR(MAX) datatypes, but what can I do for SQL 2000?I know NTEXT is going away and that there are l