Warning: This post is about poop. If you do not want to read about poop, stop reading now.
About 6 week into my pregnancy I was not able to eat and was barely able to drink water. I was becoming severely dehydrated and needed something to help me to be able to get some nutrition in. I went into the doctor and they put me on Zofran. Zofran is an anti-emetic; it is one of the only anti-emetic drugs that is prescribed to pregnant women in their first trimester. While I was at the doctors office, they gave me a pill and told me that I was not allowed to leave until I was able to drink 8 oz of water. Surprisingly, within a half hour I was feeling much better and had consumed all 8 oz. I was given special instructions for my medication: "Start out taking a full pill every 6-8 hours. Then, after a couple of days cut the pills in half if you can and take a half pill every 4-6 hours. One of the major side effects of this pill is constipation. You should probably start taking a stool softener now." For some reason, the only part of the instructions that really stuck with me were the first part. I took full pills for a couple of days, tried to cut back to half pills and had to go back up to the full pill. I was taking a full pill every 6 hours, not realizing that I was really shooting myself in the foot...or rather the bowel.
I have always been what I would call an optimum pooper. (See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zm3da12qHf0 for a Pedigree commercial about puppies who are optimum poopers; this doesn't really have anything to do with pregnancy, I just really like the commercial for some reason.) I can only remember being constipated one time in my entire life. It was an unpleasant situation, caused by a radical change in diet, but it only lasted a day and then I was back on track. This is probably why I decided to ignore the nurse's instructions. I thought that if I started to feel constipated then I could run out an buy Colace. The problem with this plan is that by the time you start to feel constipated, it is probably too late to take a stool softener.
After about 3 days on Zofran, I hadn't pooped. This was odd since I pooped most every day on a regular basis. I figured it was time to take drastic action and start taking Colace. However, I didn't think I would need it so I never bought it. I didn't really feel like making a trip out to Walmart, so I figured that I would just wait one more day and see what happened. One more day passed and still no poop. I finally decided that it was in my best interest to start taking a stool softener as soon as possible. I got a large bottle of Colace and read the directions. It said to take up to 3 pills a day and that you should have a bowel movement in 12-72 hours. Since I hadn't pooped in 4 days I thought it was reasonable to take the maximum dose. About 16 hours later, however, I was paying the price for all of my short-sighted decisions.
I didn't really think fully through the mechanism of action of Colace when I decided to take the maximum dose. You see, stool softeners act by making your stool bulkier. They pull water from your body into your intestines to prevent your stool from getting too hard in the first place. However, when you let your stool get really hard, it is difficult to reverse the process and to get it to turn soft again. So, essentially I wasn't doing anything that would help my current constipation. I was helping to prevent further constipation by making the poop further back in my intestines softer, but there was not really much hope for the poop that had been sitting in there for 4 days already. The Colace was helping to create more mass, however, which caused me to feel the urge to expel the old poop from my body. All I will say about that experience is that it was a miserable 3 hours. I had never been in that much pain in my life. During those three hours on the toilet I broke out into a cold sweat, got severe hypotension at a few points and had to lay down on the floor of the bathroom to prevent passing out, and nearly threw up several times (all classic responses to severe pain). I also couldn't sit down for the rest of the day and instead had to lay on my stomach.
I am fully convinced that constipation is one small way that your body prepares you for giving birth. You have something big and hard inside of you that must get out through a smaller hole. While I believe that childbirth is infinitely worse than constipation, constipation is like doing a 5K when you are training for a marathon.
All that being said, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. If I would have listened to my nurse from the start and would have taken my Colace I would have never found myself in this situation. Colace is safe for the baby, so you might as well prevent constipation from happening if possible.
I warned you that this post was going to be about poop, so if you read it anyway and wish you hadn't that is entirely on you.
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