Poop...who knew?

I never could have guessed that large parts of my day would revolve around the stuff. Hudson's, in case you were wondering! A little background...

A few months ago Hudson began having bruising and petechiae (basically bleeding under the skin). He had some labs drawn, one of which included a finger prick. That finger didn't clot over until the next day, which earned us a round of appointments with a hematologist. She discovered that some of the Factors in his blood were low. This can lead to blood clotting problems, like what Hudson was symptomatic of. Some of the factors can be low because of vitamin deficiencies, Hudson ended up being deficient in Vitamin K. Now the big mystery is to figure out why he's Vitamin K deficient, he's never had clotting problems before this.

His mito doctor thinks he's not absorbing things correctly in his intestines, leading to vitamin deficiency. So new GI problem #1.

Problem #2.
About this time Hudson began to have cycles where he wouldn't poop for like a week. Besides just generally being uncomfortable, it leads to problems with his stomach bloating up badly, and a lot of retching. Hudson has had 2 surgeries to control his reflux. These surgeries mean that he can't throw up, so if he's too full of gas or formula, he retches uncontrollably, basically looks like dry heaving. It's so heartbreaking to watch him do this. The only way to help him is to open his G-button, hook it to a tube, and vent out whatever air or formula is in there.

Hudson is tube fed continuously through the night by a feeding pump, so the other issue we were having is that because he was so uncomfortable, he would cry and not be able to rest, so we'd unhook his feed, which isn't great because he needs that nutrition.

The GI decided to put him on Miralax to get things going. After just a few days on it, Huddy landed in the hospital with dehydration. He was having upwards of 9-10 poops a day! So even with his full feeds running, he quickly dehydrated. His GI said he has never seen Miralax do that to anyone. I said well yeah, that would be Hudson.

After discontinuing the Miralax, the constipation resumed and the GI found he was impacted. So currently we are trialing a tiny dose of milk of magnesia. Cross your fingers, so far so good! He is only going just a few days between stools now. The GI told us if the milk of magnesia doesn't do the trick we'll have to check for bacterial overgrowth in his intestines, which could also be the cause of his vitamin deficiency.

So that's the current update on little Huddy's GI situation, who knew I'd come to talk about poop so much?