Soiling after disimpaction

[emma79646]

Hi everyone, I'm new to this website but I'm so relieved to come across so many people that know what we're going through with our 4 year old son. He has suffered with constipation since at least July, although we think it could be longer. We started movicol sachets two twice a day on advice of a paediatric consultant back in August, which made him poo more regularly but he was still soiling. Then we started disimpaction at the start of October. We've been giving high doses (between 6 - 8 sachets) since then! He has pooed every day, sometimes twice, and he got to very watery stools (like gravy, sorry) but we just couldn't get him to brown water. We struggled to get him to drink it. Then this week he had two different looking poos, they were a bit more solid and browner, could this be the old poo blockage? He had watery poos either side of these. He had a couple of days without soiling but he had a tiny bit of soiling today. Does this mean he is still impacted?? Even though he is pooing every day?

I should mention that he's still in pull ups and its so so stressful. We juts want to sort this so we can focus on getting him to stop withholding and hopefully start getting him to use the toilet.

[Yaleamanda]

Sounds like you need to fully disimpact.

[H1234K]

Hi Emma, we had a similar issue during disimpaction with my 4 year old son, we were on the highest dose 8 sachets for a couple of weeks plus full dose of sodium picosulphate added, and never reached the ‘tea’ stage. This was our second attempt, with the first stopping too prematurely I think. I was advised by one of the lovely ERIC nurses that we might never reach ‘tea’ consistency because he was eating so much (we have never had an appetite issue). So we stopped and reduced to 4 sachets. We still had ‘some’ soiling for a long time after this (still do on occasion) but after so long being stretched the bowel needs to be retrained, and the child needs to learn what all the sensations feel like, it’s a long process requiring the patience of a saint unfortunately.

I also struggled to be sure if the soiling was overflow or not, but overflow is sticky grainy foul smelling stuff, quite dark. Whereas normal poo with ‘accidents’ has foody bits in, different colours, and doesn’t smell quite so rank (it’s funny how talk about poo consistency, and the daily scrubbing of pants becomes completely normal! 🤦‍♀️)

Disimpaction is a traumatic for everyone though, you don’t want to have to start all over again from scratch, much better to keep going on full dose a few more days just to make sure it’s done properly.

The ERIC helpline nurses are amazing though, if you’ve not already given them a call, you won’t regret it.

[emma79646 in reply to H1234K]

Amazing, thank you. He seems to be OK on four sachets at the moment, going daily and much less soiling, so fingers crossed we have sorted it! Just need to try to tackle the withholding next 🙈