Sheikh'n It With The Shenkirs: Claire

We had a crazy week! Claire ended up having to get a colonoscopy at Texas Children's. She's always had some tummy problems, and her GI specialist wanted to make sure nothing serious was going on. We got the test results and she is perfectly healthy! We are so relieved.

Normally, I wouldn't share anything like this on a blog, but when I looked to find help on the bowel clean out procedure, there was nothing! Thankfully, I guess not a lot of toddlers need colonoscopy's. Which is awesome--however, for those that do-I wanted to share how we did the bowel clean out process, which was a much more difficult day than the actual procedure.

At Texas Children's they let them eat anything up until noon the day before. Starting at noon they have to drink a 6 oz Miralax/Gatorade concoction (coming out of a 32 oz. pitcher) every 15 minutes until it is all gone. Are you still with me? Getting a toddler to just drink 6 oz of chocolate milk within 15 minutes is difficult, let alone this 32 oz. crappy mixture.

So, I went ahead and bought some presents--think--baby alive, bubbles, dora, sophia, etc. I spent the night before wrapping them up and after each 6 oz. she could open up a present. Sounds easy in theory...not so much in reality. Once she realized what was going on--after the first cup, she said she didn't want any more presents. It took me 5 hours to get her to take all of the liquid and she only pooped once! At 6 pm. I called the doctor on call and told him what happened. He informed that I needed to double the miralax dosage and continue to give it to her every 15 minutes until she would go-he said it was very important to get it done as quickly as possible. By this time, my sweet toddler was not so sweet and was tired. But, if I didn't have her cleaned out they would not do the procedure. So...from 6 pm to 11 pm this was my schedule:

1. Get a medicine dropper, fill it with miralax/gatorade mixture- force it down her

2. Have some wine.

3. Repeat until we see some action

Finally, it worked! She passed out in my arms at 11 and by the end of the day had consumed over an entire bottle of Miralax. I wanted to share in case someone else needed to know. It was much easier for me to give her the medicine dropper every 2/3 minutes than sit there with a drink. For some reason, she took the dropper from me much easier. Whew! We are so thankful for good results.

My sister watched Elise this week so we could take care of everything with Claire. She loved going to the car wash!