Bastard wanking chronic constipation

[treedelivery]

GGGGGGraaaaaahhhh!!

I hate it. Dropped dd1 [6] at school. She's cold, pale, shivery, lethargic and knackered. She's had senna, movicol, 300mls of water this morning alone and it will not fucking budge. SHe pushed and strained and pushed and strained. Her anus is dilated and her poor little bum is turning inside out. 5.5 bloody years of this, am drained with it.

I'm really miserable and needed a rant. Sorry for the language

Do you a deal treedelivery, we'll swap our DCs bottoms! Your DD will have to turn into a boy for a while, but i'll guarantee that she will be able to become an olympic stooler! My benefit will be not having to worry that he wants to go every 5 minutes!
Deal or No Deal?!! [grin}

Does your ds have helth problems too? It's awful isn't it? I'm sure going the other way is just as horrible as constipation.

Hoping new medications might help a bit. We have senna to try with consultants blessing, where as before if I gave it off my own bat I always felt scared.

Sigh.

health

Treedelivery - i can only sympathise. DS2 had chronic constipation for a good four and a half years, and it's only in the last six months or so that he's actually pooing regularly (for him) and despite my best efforts DD now has chronic constipation. I've gone past my wits end and just can't understand why she's got it too

Have you tried a child psychologist?

DS1 had chronic constipation and we got fed up of it being dismissed and told to eat prunes/ drink juice (which he did by the gallon!)

Eventually saw a child paedrician in London who said it had become a viscious cycle... DS had probably had an anal fissure at some point and found it painful to poo, then began 'witholding' as he didn't want to go through it again, and then it was so solid hard that it DID hurt again, and so on.

He prescribed us a very old 'solution' which worked perfectly - liquid (food grade) paraffin oil (available with a prescription through the chemist I think). It just 'oiled the stools' as it isn't absorbed by the body. He didn't need to take it for long.

Things started moving along rapidly and DS very quickly got out of the cycle.

Treedelivery: sure you've thought of this already or it's been raised by your consultant but haveyou looked at diet? DS had shockingly bad chronic constipation when he was younger which after many months of trying various solutions, were advised by a paed gastro consultant that the most likely cause was dietary and most likely dairy products. We cut out all dairy completely and although it took about 2-3 months to have an effect, it eventually got everything back on course. We then spent about a year slowly reintroducing things into his diet to see which were okay and which were not.

Ok I know the majority of childhood constipation is just that but in our case my little girl suffered for years being told to take senna and movicol and drink more water until we were at the end of our tether. Eventually we found out she has a functional problem with her bowel and no amount of laxatives would work .. Many operations later we still are struggling . I am not trying to scare anybody but please don't be fobbed off by being told it's just constipation !!! Ok sorry rant over I just hate to see anyone else's little one go through this ..

Often they hold on and then it dries in the bowel and then hurts and on and on....

Hi all thanks for the replies.

PUMBA can I ask what sort of things I should look out for and if there was anything about your dd's condition that was a clue to her problem?

Diet - tick. We have actually been told she may have been getting too much fibre, that to deal with it her body would need litres of fluid which it doesn't get. I'd say her diet is normal to good. We have our days where it isn't perfect, but generaly it is. It has got better since she was a toddler and utterly constipated, her appetite has ncreased slightly.

Dairy - haven't tried that. Maybe something to think about. DD2 has been dairy free due to her intolerance, thought off dd1 being dairy free is really scary actually. She hated all the milk alternatives etc that she tried when dd2 was using them.

Linseed - I used to use lots of it, and flax. Must get back into good habit there!! Thank you for reminding me!

Withholding - lots as a toddler, now never. She is compliant and eager to please and will puch and try even when it hurts I am very lucky she is so willing to try please me, yet that is partly what got us here. She just kept trying and never complained. I didn't realise things were so bad I'll never forgive myself. I normalised it all. It was just life.

It wasn't until we moved to a 3 story house with loads of stairs we realised how slow and sluggish she was. She wanted carrying up stairs. SHe was 3.5, and it wasn't until then I realised. So until it effected me in other words. Guilt. Lots of guilt.

We are advised we should do a major clear out. As many sachets of movicol as it takes, and for about a week. He suggests she needs an utter emptying of her system. Then plenty of everything, and wind down from there.

I want to take her off school for a week to do it, but she has already missed a fair bit with illness and poo issues. Yet as she rightly says, why shoudl she spend her holiday with belly ache and in the house pooing.

She has a 'mega colon' so it will hold any load really, and the nerves will never feed back and tell her to pass the load. This is due to overstretching longterm.
Her bowel is weak also, due to poor nerve messages and overloading, so her peristlisis[sp?] is not great.

It's a long road.

WHY didn't I do something earlier?????? Nearly 2 years into treatment and it's made hardly any difference. We are still ruled by poo. Her mood, her friendships, her free time, everything.

Add exercise to your list - her running up and down the stairs etc by herself will also help the stool move.
Another mother told me how her dd's constipation improved radically after she started horseriding (maybe a bit drastic?)

Have you tried Lactulose as well as movicol? Or dulcolax? That one works overnight.

for my dd2's chronic constipation she has:

Movicol,
Lactulose,
docusol (adult version of ducolax = stronger), micro-enemas,
phosphate and olive oil enemas.

Hers has an underlying reason but is still nonetheless quite debilitating!

I hope yours can get sorted soon.

Treedelivery - have you no done the mega-movicol yet!?! I thought that is what you meant by saying she had movicol?

Get it done asap - nothing will come for the first few hours, even days, then it should clear and you can reduce gradually and then do it again in a lesser format if the problem comes back.

No we haven't meltedmarsbars - no one told us too. It was always a case of jiggling slightly with increase/decrease but never this big attack.
I think I have been really slow to pick up on how this needs handling, and in 3 or 4 consutations no one has said anything

She has loads of activity - we made an effort to always have long walks when she was younger. Now she has gymnastcs, ballet and swimming - all of which are ok until she is bloated and lethargic.

I didn't say, a tiny detail the movicol makes her feel crap. It makes her bloated and nauseous. She really is too, she goes lime if she has more than 1.5 sachets.

Check with the GP then follow the guidelines on the instruction leaflet.

When you manipulate her stomach, can you feel where the hard lumps are, how far down it all is, or is it all at the sphincter?

The movicol will fill her up - its a lot of liquid to take. And the constipation itself will make her feel crap too (excuse the pun )

It was explained to me thus: Movicol is an electrolyte, takes the fluid all the way down the gut. Lactulose works by absorbing fluid from the surrounding tissues once its at the bowel. So each works in a different way.

Glycerine suppositories to break up and lubricate the rocks in the rectum, docusate also helps to break them up.

Too much high fibre is bad because of the distended colon - you end up with large hard stools that can't be passed.

Boiled carrots, stewed apple, satsumas, prunes all help.

I am so sorry you and she are going through this. It will take years to fix, but it can be done.

Tummy massage helps too. If you can find a qualified holistic massage therapist they can teach you how to do it properly.

We are lucky to have a star of a chiropractor, she showed me a good tummy massage, and I am easily able to feel stool and wind bubbles. It is always there to just above her hip bone. I thought I could feel it down the other side too, so that would mean a full large intestine full I always thought I was mistaken and it couldn't be so. However, after yesterday I'm not so sure now.

My poor little thing, she's only 9th centile weight [50th height] and a string bean. How does she carry it all around with her? I nag her to eat all the time, I bet she feels like shit, and I'm nagging her to eat.

we have tried suppositories twice. Once in a&e when she was in agony and I thought she was in real trouble. It worked but she found it really traumatic.
I tried once too, but I couldn't get it in. She screamed and that was that for me I'm afraid.

Her consulatant didn't say how much to give on this big clear out thing. I thought 6, but it shoudl probably be more I guess

Just on the dairy free thing, it really did make the world of difference for us and, when we saw the gastro paed, she said right away that in the absence of any underlying physiological condition it was the most likely cause. They can do blood tests to check it out quickly and easily (although we didn't bother cos it seemed to make a lot of sense for us).

Cutting out dairy was quite hard but you adapt very quickly. There's much better pure milk substitutes these days, and the flavoured milks taste absolutely exactly the same as normal milks. The main problem for DS was/ is eggs which means you have to cut out cake and biscuits, but god it was worth it.

If she does have an intolerance then clearing out her system is great but won't actually fix the problem (as we know from experience!)

On the movicol, she can have up to eight sachets a day.

On one memorable occasion DS2 was hospitalised with suspected faecal(sp?) impaction they gave him 15 sachets at once in a glass of orange juice. That was fun.

Have you tried a child psychologist?

Something that i read on another thread that might help in a strange way is balloon blowing. I think that regardless of whether it's constipation/diarrhoea/ withholding and leakages etc, they all start to suffer with their bodies knowing what to do at the appropriate time. Apparently blowing up a balloon in puffs can stimulate the same pattern as trying to do a number 2. The attention away from the toilet will also relax them. And ultimately if it does nothing other than make the using of the toilet slightly less of an ordeal, then its a step in the right direction.

Hi we realised that there was more to it with my little girl when nothing worked movicol suppositories senna enema's she would get more and more bloated she never tolerated large volumes of movicol. We were admitted to hosp numerous times to have klean prep via a nasal gastric tube and she would still need to go to theatre to have the poop removed..... At that point the hosp referred her on for further investigations and we realised that we could have saved years of heart ache as we were just told she will grow out of it !!! I think the best thing to do is trust your instinct as a mum I thought for a long time that the doctors were missing something but never pushed them to investigate further!!

ThePosieParker - no we haven't. Mainly because dd1 has never expressed any fear or sign of anything similar. The opposite in fact, she is always delighted to achieve a poo and have it 'out of the way'

When she was young we would have a magic wand and a magic cloth, we sprinkled glitter on her head and all sorts . Now she is what I would call 'sensible' about it all.

Do you think a sychologist would help, or have something to offer? We would cheerfully try anything and value all imput.

We have heard of the balloon thing auntevil . Do you think it has a better affect than simply pushing?
She squats on the loo, which is odd, but works a treat. It's obviously an issue at school and in public loos, where they aren't clean enough for her to hold on.

PUMBA that sounds awful awful. I did talk to the consultant about operations, and he she is no way near needing that, in his opinion. I agree with him. For all my dramatics, guilt and worry, it isn't in that league at all.
I'm sorry you have had that to deal with, how really really awful. I hope your dd is improved now.

i was going to suggest diet too. my cousin had a similar thing, and once dairy was removed from her diet it improved almost immediately

if fibre has also been suggested as a concern have you tried cutting down on it? it's only certain fibres that are a problem isn't it? that need lots of water?

i think there is nothing to lose from cutting out dairy.. if it does nothing then just reintroduce it. you'd want to cut it out for about a month though to see a difference (if that's causing it)

hope you get it sorted, it sounds awful for her :(