Poop Happens

Potty training for the first two boys hasn't been easy and although we thought we had two down and one to go last spring/summer we've hit a road block. Warning: This post isn't for the weak of stomach.

Shortly after we declared victory on having Matt fully potty trained he started having all of these poop accidents. Seeing it was summer I dismissed it and said that once he was back into school he'd see all his friends doing it and get back on track. Well fall came and went, I mentioned it to his Dr. casually in late October and he reminded me that it wasn't a big deal and to focus on staying positive, good diet and sticker charts, etc. Well by January I still didn't see any relief so I talked to the Dr. again, he suggested that Matt had probably been constipated at one point, had a painful experience and now was holding it to prevent having to go but the end result was constipation. He's direction was to starting using Miralax to help get things moving. We did that and while it helped in someways it hurt others. He was going more but most of the time still in his pants. Yuck!

Well all of the above is still true but now we know that he's been so constipated that he actually has a blockage in his colon and as a result has stretched it out and his body has lost some of its control and will often not listen to the normal clues that it sends out to say it is time to go. It is called encopresis. The short version of the story is that we need to clean him out, read enema, then make sure that he keeps taking the Miralax so that he can be successful all of the time and basically retrain him all over again. The good news is this is very common (and normal) especially in 4 year old boys, the bad news is this process could take several months to correct itself.

So in the meantime I think we'll buy stock in Miralax and probably Hanes or Fruit of the Loom. And I'll try to stock up on patience, so if you have extra of that floating around send it my way.