Movicol/Laxido advice

[MammaElf]

Hello

My 21 month old DD was prescribed Laxido following some large poos which caused her some pain and bleeding and led to her not going for a poo for a number of days at a time. I was told to give her 1 sachet daily but I'm stuck in a bit of a vicious cycle with regard to the dosing. It takes a while for the laxido to kick in (around 3-7 days) and then when it does she has 3 or more mushy poos per day so, in line with the instructions, I reduce or stop the dose but then after a few days she stops pooing at all so I start giving her a full sachet again, but then it takes days to work again..and then the cycle repeats. I'm trying to get to one nice, soft poo per day! Any advice on how I might be able to do this?

It is horrible to try to get a balance! For my son, after we reached the very soft poo I found the following day giving half but the the day after full so I was alternating half and full sachets. It got him into a routine of going to the toilet and then I reduced it further after a few weeks. I also changed his diet and made him have weetabix every morning (no more rice crispier or coco pops!) and made sure he drank lots. Good luck in finding a balance

Don't try to get off it too fast. In order to have such big poos, she must have stretched up her rectum (last bit of the gut) through being constipated for a while, or there would be nowhere for the enormous poo to form. If you rapidly turn down the movicol as soon as the poo goes soft, then that overstretched last bit of gut will just fill up again, and set like concrete. Quite often, when you first get really soft poo coming through, it isn't because you've managed to shift the old hard rocks out of the stretched area, but because you've loosened up the new poo coming down enough for it to squidge past the old rocks. So can take a while of tolerating gravy/porridge consistency poo, before you can even think about reducing.

Even when you've got rid of the rocks, the stretched up area still needs to heal up. And for that to happen they need to be pooing way better than normal. So at that stage, you're aiming for scrambled egg consistency poo at least once daily for weeks (months if this has been going on a while).

Thanks so much to both of you for your replies, I really appreciate the advice!

Thanks for taking the time to reply Miaow, such great advice I'm going back to the drs tomorrow to see if they'll prescribe a disimpaction regime so we can start with a clean slate and will check out your other recommendations. I'm looking forward to all this talk of poo being a distant memory!!