Tag: poorlykids

*Warning: this post contains poo talk and general rankness*

I know I’ve been AWOL for a while and as per my previous post, the reason was my poorly 2 year old. Well, we got the the bottom of the issue (literally the bottom) and he seems to be almost back to his usual self. 

He had been vomiting every day, starting  around 2-3am, for a week and he’d had diarrhoea as well. So in the early hours of Wednesday morning I decided to take him to a&e because he appeared to be dehydrated and was refusing liquids. And quite frankly I couldn’t handle the prospect of further nights of hardly any sleep. 

It wasn’t the first time he’d gone through a longish period of diarrhoea and vomiting either. The previous times our GP had said it was virus and I’d just assumed he’d picked up a bug at nursery. But after the third episode I thought it must be something more than just a bug. 

From a&e he was admitted to the children’s ward to be rehydrated and so a few tests could be done to figure out what was going on. Long story short – he was so impacted with poo that the new foods he was eating had no room to digest in his already full gut, so they were coming back up. Lovely. Constipation had been an ongoing problem but because of the diarrhoea I’d assumed he was clear. Not the case. The diarrhoea was food squeezing around the mass of stuck poo, in a desperate bid to escape the overcrowded gut of my son. 

As I said, constipation had been an ongoing issue. My second child was born with a congenital heart defect, very nearly died, and was in hospital for 6 weeks after he was born. During that time I stayed in hospital with him, for the most part in a hospital a few hours away from where we live. My eldest had just turned 2 and he stayed with my parents, and although he was well looked after, he was unsettled. It was the first time he’d been away from me for more than a few nights at a time and I was only seeing him once or twice a week when he visited the hospital. It was during those awful weeks that the constipation took hold. 

What causes constipation in children?

I had no idea constipation in children was so common until I took my boy to a clinic and it was rammed full of bunged up kids. The paediatric specialist explained that it is really common and there are several causes for constipation in a child; it’s not always as simple as just putting it down to diet. 

Illness – a period of illness, just a simple cold or tummy bug, can cause constipation.

Habit – if a child passes a painful stool once they might be fearful of going again and try to hold their poo in. Leading to harder stools and a vicious cycle. 

Diet – obviously if a child isn’t eating much fibre it can cause them to be constipated. 

Historic – some babies are born with bowel issues and might be constipated from birth. 

So how can it be dealt with? Initially I tried all the usual remedies; apple juice, prune juice, lactulose, etc. When they didn’t work my GP prescribed Movicol (a powder that is dissolved in water) but that still didn’t work. What was required was a disimpaction regime, which was started off at the hospital. The backlog (log! Haha!) had to be cleared out so the number of sachets of Movicol I gave my boy was doubled every day until he had the worst diarrhoea anyone in the history of the universe has ever had. I’m talking a tsunami of brown water from the bog of eternal stench exploding from his backside. In fact it was worse than that, I don’t even have the words.  

 

 
Once the stuff coming out was brown water with bits in I knew he was cleared out and we could reduce the Movicol to a maintenance dose. I’d been given a handy poo chart so I knew what consistency of poo I needed to aim for. (Seriously, I can’t believe the words I’m typing sometimes.)

When a kid has been constipated their colon becomes enlarged (doctors call it megacolon but that makes me snigger!) so Movicol is required, sometimes for years, to help retrain the gut and get it back into shape.

Although the doctors were generally great, no one really told me what to expect with the disimpaction regime or how I would know the poo mass had been cleared out but I found this great website, which has a lot of info: The Children’s Continence Charity. I’d recommend checking it out of you’re ever faced with a poo query. 

Or you could always ask me. I’m pretty read up on kid constipation now. Can’t say it was ever something I intended to master but such is a mum’s life!