Bowel impaction

[Mo1512]

My eight year old granddaughter has a badly impacted bowel , diagnosed a week and a half ago but has been having problems with vomiting for the last six weeks . She is currently on a disimpaction regime of 10 Movicol a day , but progress is extremely slow and she’s continuing to vomit and experience stomach pain . Is it normal to take this long to resolve ? How can we help to speed up the process and help her? She has missed loads of school , and despite repeated return visits to medics over the last few days we are just being told to continue the treatment 🥺any advice appreciated!

[Yaleamanda]

At her age the maximum dose is 12 sachets per day, so work upto that it will help and request a stimulant laxative to go alongside the regime. Disimpaction can take time. If the vomiting continues I would seek medical advice although as she is impacted it is most likely due to that.

[dharshana]

Dear mom, it's a painful process and also a very very slow process. it's going to take about a month to get to a point where we can understand her body's cycle. initial days are so difficult for both the child and the caretaker to see the child going through all this pain. but trust me, it will soon change and she will get normal. she will get into a routine of pooping once a day or twice gradually. all we have to have is patience and trust.but indeed it's a hard process ;-( . please make sure she is on movicol as prescribed everyday . make sure she poops when she gets that feel. make sure she is distracted. all this will help. but for some initial days , we have to avoid other things and concentrate on her

[Beatrice81]

We were in a similar situation a few weeks ago (disimpaction number 2 this year) with very little progress, even after ramping up the movicol. The GP sent us to hospital when my son started vomiting. He was prescribed sodium picosulfate there (a stimulant -to get things moving). After taking a fairly high dose (10ml morning and evening) for three days, things finally got moving. We carried on with movicol at the same time, taking up to 12 sachets until we reached the watery poo stage.I understand how tough this is but a stimulant will definitely help.

It's early days after disimpaction for us; my son still has a tendency to withhold so we're keeping him on a fairly high maintenance dose (4 sachets). After the first time disimpacting we made the mistake of giving too little maintenance dose and this caused him to be impacted again a few months later. So that's something to be mindful of when you get to that stage.

Please know that things will get better. Best wishes xx

[Ejcrossman1]

Hey, sorry to hear it’s taking so long for the movicol to work. We where in the same situation a few weeks ago. The doctor prescribed lactulose as well as the movicol which seemed to help my son a lot x