5 Year Old Digestion. Tummy feels like glass.

[Changelingss]

So our daughter has been waking up most evenings in the last week, in absolute tears as her tummy hurts, she’s described it as cracking eggs or broken glass in her tummy.

For background she suffered with horrific wind and seriously oversized poops, (the biggest I’ve ever seen, they made my eyes water just looking at them). She would scream in agony when passing stools as a little one and wake up screaming with wind as a baby.

She still sometimes has large poops and intermittent diarreah, she’s improved a lot but she used to hold poops which didn’t help with constipation and diarreah, we still encourage her to go. The doctors prescribed her lactulose to help with the poops. She can also appear quite dark under her eyes, despite plenty of sleep, fluids and a good diet, these are hereditary but have read that they can be a sign of allergies. Attempted a dairy free diet when she was 3 but failed miserably, she can be quite fussy so it cut her options down quite significantly, she’s a bit better with her diet now though.

Will call the doctors tomorrow but wondering if anyone has had any similar experiences and what the outcome was?

It sounds like a food intolerance of some kind, although children can have abdominal migraine?

Thank you, will look into it.

My dd (5) suffers awfully with constipation. It’s worth trying movicol instead of lactulose, my dd responded much better to movicol.

Couple of things I would do if you haven’t already, try and up her fluid intake, it makes all the difference and then have a look at the ERIC website. It’s an invaluable source of information for childhood constipation. We also intermittently use a probiotic or something like actimel to help with gut health overall.

I think your priority is to get her bowel moving regularly with medication assistance. Allergies can take a while to narrow down and weed out (you might want to try and get a paediatric or dietician referral for support) and meanwhile her bowel really needs to start recovering, chronic constipation can stretch the bowel making it harder for it to move the stool along and slow everything down more.

Also, before I forget again!, there are various exercises they give to adults (brace/push) but it can be quite hard to convey to children. Blowing bubbles on the toilet can help them with opening their bowels using the right muscles and breathing.

@Cornettoninja. Thank you so much, will look into everything you said, the bubbles might make poop time a bit more interesting for her, maybe even a little fun. Hope things improve for your DD, it’s horrible when they’re constipated.