Encopresis - does anyone have any guidance on this ?

[eachbeach]

DD is nearly 5 and a half. Has poo withheld for nearly two years. We're sure it's psychological. She's been on movicol for 18 months. Twice she's "fallen out" of her routine (for no obvious reason) and we've then given slightly different routines.

This time we're three months out of routine and she's having near daily "leakage" accidents. School are being very supportive but it's hugely impacting her and it won't be long before the other kids cotton on.

She's just been off for two weeks and as per consultant recommendations we ramped up the movicol until she was having multiple accidents daily which were watery. We then scaled down to eventually to two movicol a day ten days ago and she had, until yesterday, an accident free week, with 1-2 soft pops a day.

Yesterday (and today at school) she has had small accidents (plus a soft poo last night). She seems genuinely incapable of and taken by surprise by the accidents, but as she's pooing so frequently I can't see that it's overspill.

I am at a loss at how to help her and where to go from here. We're making another consultant appointment but we've found him to be pretty uninterested.

No direct advice I'm afraid, but have you checked out the Eric website? (Eric - children's bowel and bladder Charity). They have lots of advise on this. Good luck with it.

Hi yes, keep meaning to phone their helpline. Just don't know why the leakage after such regular poo !

I have much experience of this, my child had similar issues. I found movicol not to be helpful and a consultant we saw said to try senakot. This works on the pushing feeling and it really helped us. We used a combination of a low dose of movicol, about half sachet I think and small dose of senokot. Regular toilet sitting and reading for 10 mins on loo even if poo not needed. A foot stall to put feet in better position. Make toilet time as fun as you can. Blow bubbles, anything enjoyable. Reward charts for sitting.
It was a very testing time for me, incredibly stressful, but writing this now makes it feel a long time ago. By age 8 she was pretty much accident free, it can be a long road but it will get better. One Gp we saw at age 6 was quite surprised by my stress and said it was so common and that I shouldn’t worry. She told me most kids are over it by 10 and hopefully by 8. She was right in our case.
Now we have no accidents, age 10. Hopefully it will improve before then for you but just wanted to let you know that it can get better.
Eric are great and they used to have a chat page on health unlocked which was extremely helpful which is probably still there and will be full of people going through similar.

I had a book too, think it was called the Ins and Outs of poop. It was helpful.