Constipation

As we walked in to Averi’s GI appointment today, the nurse informed us that our doctor had an emergency come up and we would be seeing someone else. With Kaili I’d be fine with that but it’s a little bit more frustrating when your child has a long list of chronic problems.

Every time you see a new doctor you have to lay everything out on the table again, because they can’t seem to be able to read charts, and it makes for a long visit. Fortunately, Averi doesn’t have too many negative things going on with her GI system right now and the doctor was really nice. He said that her G-Tube site looked good and he didn’t need to worry about weight gain since Nutrition is following it.

My main concern for him was about Averi’s constipation. I know you are probably all tired of hearing about her poop (me too) but it’s hard to ignore when she screams bloody murder every time she tries to go, even if it is 4:00 in the morning.

When I talked to the GI nurse about it a few weeks ago, she said to give Averi 1-2 tsp of Milk of Magnesium every day for a week to help clean everything out. It took three doses before anything happened, and then it all came out. In fact, one day Dan thought I said to give her 1-2 Tablespoons, and we spent the next 24 hours wiping poop of off just about everything she touched.

Now that she’s been off of the Milk of Magnesium for a week, the constipation is back. The doctor said that we are going to have to keep her on it, along with giving her the juice that Nutrition suggested. I’m not too crazy about keeping her on a medication long term but he said that as she gets older and her muscle tone improves (yah, right) we should be able to get her off of it.

I also asked about doing a follow up biopsy on her intestines to make sure she doesn’t have any more irritation from her allergies. Her doctor had mentioned this to me before but nothing was noted in the chart so I was told that we would be contacted if a follow up was necessary.