I am ... Mia's impacted colon

As you might recall, Mia has had issues with constipation since her accident, because she doesn't walk, so her insides don't move things around as well as they should, and therefore things get blocked up. Recently, her issues have gotten worse, which is too bad. We took her to the gastroenterologist in late December just for a regular check-up, and the doctor was very concerned with her "impacted colon." Yeah, you never really want to hear that phrase in conjunction with anything, so it was a bit distressing. Her scoliosis is making her constipation worse, because her spine is bent so badly that it's crunching her colon a bit, so that solid waste moves through it even less easily than it used to, which is not a very good thing. So we had to take steps!

The first day, we gave Mia an enema. If I live to be 200 years old, I never want to give anyone an enema ever again. It wasn't even that awful, but it was very awkward and the entire concept of it was just terrible to comprehend. People actually give enemas for a living? That's cray-cray, I tells ya. Anyway, we gave her a lot of MiraLAX, a lot of suppositories, and we tried to clean her out. After that we tried to ease back on it a little, but enough to maintain her pooping. Her gastroenterologist, whom I have seen far too often over the past two months, wants her to poop every day, which is never going to happen, I'm afraid. So she wants us to be really aggressive about giving Mia various aids, and I'm not as comfortable with it. The problem is that for whatever reason, Mia will not poop for several days (even with MiraLAX and suppositories) and then over the course of a few days, she'll basically never stop. It's awful, and then the cycle begins again. With the MiraLAX, her stool was getting softer, and because of that, it wasn't as obvious when she had pooped, so the possibility that she would sit with it in her diaper for a while came up, and that leads to urinary tract infections and just general messiness. We've had to dump her in the bath tub quite a lot in the past two months because it's pointless to try to clean her up any other way. That's not a lot of fun when I'm home alone, let me tell you. I would love for her to poop every day, of course, but I'd rather it be every few days and be a fairly well-defined stool rather than every day of mushiness. I don't think the gastroenterologist agrees.

So we've been trying to find a balance. I go back to the doctor, she tells me to try this and that, I try this and that, and it works with varying degrees of timeliness. One problem is that Mia's new food, which isn't a milk-based or synthetic formula but blended food, seems a lot easier on her stomach, so she doesn't act as uncomfortably constipated as she used to. Back in the day, you could tell when she was struggling to poop, because her stool was fairly hard and she would strain a lot. These days she doesn't seem to mind being constipated, and I imagine her stool isn't causing as much difficulty even if her colon is impacted. That doesn't mean it's healthy, of course, but it does mean that we tend to forget that she's probably constipated - we have a lot on our minds, after all, and when she doesn't act like she's uncomfortable, we don't think about her constipation. It's Saturday morning, and she hasn't pooped since Tuesday, but she seems fine. We're still trying, of course, but it doesn't feel like it's as much of an issue.

The latest thing we're trying is oral suppositories, which I didn't know existed. She took her first one last night, so we'll see how that works (in conjunction with the MiraLAX, of course). One reason why her gastroenterologist is so obsessed with her constipation is because of her upcoming back surgery (about five weeks away, yay!). The pain meds she'll be on cause, you guessed it, constipation, so the anticipation is that her problems with only be exacerbated. I'm not so sure, though, because if her bent spine is partly causing the severe constipation, that presumably won't be a problem after the surgery, as her spine will be, you know, straight. So while the meds might cause constipation, if we remove one factor from what's causing it and add another, it should be a net sum of zero, right? So she'll still be constipated, but about as bad as she is now, which I don't think is as bad as the doctor thinks. But we shall see. We're crossing our fingers that the surgery will be a boon to more than her sitting position!