Weird stomach bug or temporary food intolerance?

[user1470132907]

Hi all

I’ll be contacting my son’s GP in the morning, but suspect others on here have experienced similar so thought I’d ask.

My 5 year-old was on antibiotics (Amoxicillin) a couple of weeks ago for a nasty chest infection. A week after finishing the course, he started looking tired and washed out and soiled himself that night and at school the next day. This never happens. What he was producing was poo-stained mucus. That night, after school, he was on and off the loo with stomach cramps. He was very gassy but when he managed to eventually poo, it was normal consistency for him (albeit very pale).

It’s now 3 days later and he’s eating well and he’s not rushing to the loo as often. Yesterday, however, he must have run to the loo 20+ times over the day and all that came out was mucus again. Today, we’ve had much less mucus and dashes to the loo, but he is still asking for a hot water bottle for intermittent cramps. Poos, when they come, are normal consistency. He was quite sorry for himself yesterday but is on good form today.

Given his lack of actual diarrhea, I am wondering if he has developed a temporary food sensitivity rather than caught a bug? It seems to be worse after he drinks milk, which he adores, but I’ve not exactly been scientific about it! I have read about antibiotics sometimes triggering things like this and a probiotic being needed.

The only diet change he’s hasn’t recently is that we’ve moved to whole meal bread from 50/50z

I’d say diarrhoea, milk is one of the worse things to have when you’ve got diarrhoea so it will be making it far worse.

It can take a while to shift plain bland foods. Google what he can and can’t eat it will help shift it

Fab, thank you so much. Will definitely stay off the milk!

Mucus sounds like a temporary dairy intolerance. I’d cut down on it and give him some child probiotics (syrup/chewable, not the milky drinks!) and see how he gets on after a couple of weeks.

The antibiotics would have hit his stomach hard, they kill good & bad bacteria so they can really mess with the gut flora & make him more sensitive to stuff he was fine with before. I've had this with my DD when she was small too. I'd recommend getting him some Viridian kids pro/prebiotics to fix his gut flora, you can mix it up in drinks. Maybe think about switching to oat milk for a while too, oats are good for the good gut bacteria & it's not diary, which I agree is the likely culprit as it's harder to digest. He might be more susceptible to bugs too as the immune system is affected by gut flora problems too.

This is all so helpful, thank you. Will get probiotics and oat milk tomorrow.