You should have known

Warning! This post is about poop!

About a week ago I wrote a little diddy about Diego's recent battle with constipation.  It was rough for me to see my little boy go through it.  After that post, we thought the worst was over.  We kept up his diet according to the advice nurse and expected his next poop to be softer.  Two days later, it turns out that not much had changed yet.  I joked that my picky eater was doing this on purpose so that he wouldn't have to eat Thanksgiving dinner.

Then we went through the entire poop experience again when it was "Number-2 time".  Only this time could have possibly been worse. I didn't know how to explain it to the advice nurse without getting really gross.  I said, "It looked like his inside also came out a little when he pushed the poop out and it was very red and swollen."  I was immediately given a same-day appointment where I had to describe the whole ordeal over again to the doc.

The doc said the words, "Rectal Prolapse" and prescribed my little D with 1/2 capful of Miralax with any liquid daily with the goal of one soft poop a day for the next 3 MONTHS!  Why so long?  The kid is traumatized now and doesn't want to do the deed and holds it in as long as he can.  The doc wants to give him time to forget about the whole ordeal, and will do a rectal exam some time later.  Doc scared me because he mentioned this is also a symptom of cystic fibrosis.  I'm hoping it's just a result of really hard poop that his little body just couldn't handle.

It's tough.  Although I'm a mom of two now, I still feel very much like a new mom every day.  Especially in my dealings with Diego.  He is my first and gives me just about all of my first motherhood experiences.  Sometimes I feel like I'm too slow to the punch and my little D suffers unnecessarily.  My mind is saying, "You should have known what to do during the first poop."  But how was I supposed to know?  I couldn't just give him meds without a doc's recommendation, and we really thought a high-fiber diet would help.  It's an internal mom-struggle that I like to torture myself with:  You should have known.

And Mateo, the second child, will be lucky if he is ever constipated because I will know just what to do.  But on topics like this my ignorance is not fair to my first born, since I'm still learning through his trials.  I'm so sorry DD, Mama will get her act together somehow.  The good news is that immediately after his first Miralax dose, his first post-poop was as uneventful and non-traumatic as it ever could have been.  Sigh of relief right here!

Still feeling guilty though - Shirley