I know exactly what you mean! It’s so hard to know whether an accident is due to overflow or because the laxatives are too strong therefore making the poo too runny and therefore impossible to control. I’ve recently come to the conclusion that if the accident is very large and wet then it’s due to the medicine. Overflow seems to be more of a sticky smudge in her pants rather than loads of poo.
My daughters accidents were 10 times worse on high doses of laxatives so I’ve gradually reduced them to a point that she still poo’s everyday but it’s not too runny. Her accidents have reduced dramatically (2-3 big ones a day to about 1 minor smudge in the pants a fortnight).
I do worry that this could be causing her to slowly get blocked again but without a magic mirror that allows me to look inside her bowels everyday , this is the best I can do!
I think you just need to trust your instincts and go with what you think. If you decide to change the laxatives just do it very gradually (and preferably have a chat with your paediatrician first). And maybe some days they’ll need more than others.
Just do your best as that’s all you can do! Good luck 🙂
Thank you for your reply it is much appreciated. What I have found with my son when I have tried to reduce the laxatives he poos less the accidents increase. Perhaps i need to reduce him slightly to see if this happens again and if so i know i have got to increase for sure.
When you reduce the laxatives how long do you wait before reducing again.
It’s so hard to know what’s best isn’t it! I wait about 3 -4 days usually. She was on 2 sachets of movicol and 30ml of Senna originally. Then the paediatrician told me to drop the movicol completely and replace it with 10ml sodium picosulphate (still with Senna). But I found that too much so dropped the picosulphate to 5ml. Then zero. Then slowly dropped Senna 5ml at a time till we got to 5ml. But then found she only pooed every 3 days but if I upped it to 10 again it was too runny. So I swapped Senna for picosulphate and she’s now only having 2.5ml a day but doing 1-2 poo’s a day at a nice consistency. She’s not accident free but only very minor accidents once a fortnight roughly.
I dare say I’ll have to keep playing around with the dose constantly... if you think about it most peoples poo’s differ from time to time depending on what we’ve eaten etc.
It’s so hard but after 2 years of laxatives and the situation just getting worse I just needed to do something different!
She was only ever on 10ml of picosulphate so I dropped to 5ml for a few days then to 2.5. It’s all guess work to be honest! With movicol I’ve heard people say to drop by half sachet at a time every 3-4 days. But my paediatrician just said to drop that completely overnight she was Go runny with it!
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