4 Year old with Stomach pain and bowel problems. help!

[Mother17]

I have a 4 year who since June has had constant stomach and bowels problems. My little one has stomach pain sometimes so severe we take her to a&e (nothing emergent is every found) , she also has times of constipation and diarrhoea and now finding small bits of blood in her stool.

i am working with a consultant at the hospital but we are waiting on a stool sample to come back, a date for an ultrasound and then maybe have some answers.

its totally taking a tool on my child as it effects her at school, playing with friends and just normal day to day.

My question is - has anyones child experienced this before and any ideas on what it could be? I feel like the results are taking ages to come back. 😩

any help/advice would be really appreciated
thanks x

My 3 year is exactly like this.

4 hospitalisations from constipation, given laxities to disempact her and left to it.

Shes had a sore stomach for days now and I've went through laxative protocol and no bowel movement yet. Keeping her off nursery again because last time the laxatives kicked in, she was very loose and some escaped and I don't want that for her at nursery.

We've not seen a consultant, how did you do that? We've been told it's normal in girls and that they're more prone to urine infections because of the constipation.

We were given movicol and lactulose to disempact her.

She's had the constipation problems for over a year.

Have you experimented with lactose or dairy free diet?

Could be inflammatory bowel disease.
My DD had constant diarrhea, weight loss, pale and no energy, leg pain at night, constant low grade fever (37.5 to 37.8 most days. I thought she just "ran hot" until she was treated; now her routine temp is 36.4).

Could also be coeliac which is better as an outcome tbh.

My son also has IBD like pp, he was constantly running a low grade fever also, what test is the stool sample for? Calprotectin? Have they done any blood tests? Inflammation markers etc? Coeliac panel?

My son had symptoms from being really young and was fi nally diagnosed with crohns at 10, and is in general alot better now he is on treatment. He used to fall asleep in nursery and have accidents at age 3, even though he was fully potty trained. Looking back at photos of him now just makes me feel so sad at how unwell he looked.

Really hope all the test results come back soon, the waiting and feeling helpless is such an awful time when all you want to do is make them better x

The stool test will rule in or out IBD

they should also check for gluten intolerance

do not cut anything out until he is tested

i hope you get answers soon x

We had a situation not too dissimilar to what you’ve described that started around the time my little one turned 4. We had the coeliac blood test done which came back negative but it seems that he’s gluten intolerant instead. Cutting out gluten once the coeliac testing was complete, stopped the (dreadful) diarrhoea, bloating and cramps. We found keeping a food diary helped link the ‘episodes’ to when he’d eaten lots of bread, pasta etc.

Thank you all so much for your replies!

so we had all the blood tests for any food allergies and they all came back fine. So no allergies.

we used the laxative the doctors gave a month back made her tummy pain much worse. They also thought it was a urine infection gave antibiotics then realised it wasn’t a urine infection.

the stool sample was sent to see if they bowel is inflamed however it’s still not back and it’s been 2 weeks.

we managed to get a meeting with a consultant because we had been to A&E like 3 times with this pain so they referred us to a doctor. The consultant has been great but I think cause I’ve been waiting on the stool sample to come back and we can’t move forward until then.

she is still majorly constipated at the moment.

Stool samples do take around 2 weeks to come back