Movicol disimpaction planning

[unicornglittersprinkles]

After a 2 year wait we've finally seen the continence nurse today and she has prescribed a disimpaction regime for DD who is 5. She suggested that disimpaction usually takes 1-2 weeks before we would drop to a maintanance dose.

There's never going to be an easy time to do this as we have to pull her out of school and we both work full time with no family nearby to support but my main concern is that we have a holiday abroad booked in 5 weeks time.
What experience have others had with disimpaction? How long should we expect to be stuck in the house and how long after disimpaction did things settle down enough to be getting out and about properly again?

Trying to figure out if we could get this done before going away or whether we'd be best waiting until we get back? I'm wondering would swimming pool, beach, days out be ok by that point? For context we have 2 other children so this is also about ensuring they're not negatively impacted too.

When we did disimpaction For ds it took 4& hours.

Once it started to move it moved 🫣 That was also all through out the night whilst he slept.

My advice is to get some of those bed wetting sheets to change them throughout the night and sleep in no clothes.

Once he was clear going to maintenance dose was easy and he returned to school.

it’s usually fairly easy once they e cleared but you do need to get into a routine of sitting on toilet daily to allow them to find the feeling again. Blowing bubbles whilst sitting helps to relax the anal sphincter and keeps them amused!

The most important thing is not to stop too soon. Once you reach the point of vast amounts of watery stool you need to keep going for a good 3 days, before dropping amounts, or you have a high risk of only partially clearing out. First few days, some children can cope with school. But generally not after that.

Once things started moving for us things settled down after about a week so hopefully you'll be fine for your holiday!

I joined the group movicol mummies and followed their advice of not dropping straight down to the maintenance and coming down slowly instead. I did this because I was so worried about needing to do it again. So it took all of the summer hols to build up quickly and then go from 8/10 sachets or whatever it was, to slowly to 7 for a few days then 6 for a few days and down to 4 by Sept. So by the time she was back at school it was ok. We just kept her in pull ups for our holiday. We were never stuck in the house. Just took lots of changes spare clothes and wipes with me. And used pull ups in some places. I had read so many stories of people having to repeat it so made sure that wasn’t happening.

We’ve been told to follow the regime on Eric but not to immediately drop to maintenance once we get watery poo. Instead the nurse said to hold for another 1-2 days before dropping to maintenance dose to be really sure.

This is what we’ve been told to do too. Hold before dropping

Some of these posts give me hope so thanks. Sad that she’ll be missing the end of term as they had a few things planned but hopeful we can get her in a good place for our holiday

Yes otherwise you run the risk of it not working...! Which is just too much to bear.

You could let her go to them so she doesn't miss out and just carry on what you need to do on the holidays. Its fine to still go out etc. We were on a really high dose on holiday and had to trek to local shops to find the drink she likes to mix it with, bring tons of pull ups etc but it was fine. We just used swim nappies for the pool.

It is really worth doing it properly - we just upped the movicol until the bowel cleared several times but it wasn't until we kept up a reasonably high dose for enough time for the bowl to return to normal size that the problem went away for good.

Now he takes 6 psyllium capsules daily instead of movicol and his bowels work well. I honestly thought this day would never come!