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Serious Concerns about my five year old daughter.
I have a question about my 5 year old daughter. I know that you do not see children; however, I have serious concerns about her. For several years she has had many medical symptoms that have not been explained. As a baby she had black jelly like blood in her stools. The doctors thought that she may have had an allergic reaction to something; however after testing she is not allergic to anything. We began to wonder if the blood was a result from maybe her stretching something in her stomach because all of the tests were normal. As she became older and was able to communicate with us she constantly complains about extremely sharp pains in and underneath her belly button in the exact same spot every time and says it feels like she is being pinched or stabbed. Out of nowhere, she also screams and states that her right leg burns and she cannot walk on it. When she has these symptoms she becomes sick. At times she has had fevers and she always vomits when she begins to hurt. When she throws up she states that the pinching and stabbing pains goes away. She has had several tests ran but they seem to be normal every time. When I ask the doctors if it is possible that she has a hernia, they will not check for one because she does not have a bulge. Everyone that I know that has a hernia and I describe my daughter’s symptoms they state they had the exact same pains.
As I stated earlier I know that you do not work with children; however, as a mother I feel helpless and want to help my child. It breaks my heart to see her in pain and we keep running into brick walls everywhere we turn. I just want answers for my daughter. If you could PLEASE give me some advice and your opinion it would be greatly appreciated more than you could ever know. Also, I live in Telford, Tennessee; however, if you know of anyone that would see her I would be willing to travel wherever necessary! -
4 Replies
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Serious Concerns about my five year old daughter.
Please provide us with updates if we can learn from them.
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Serious Concerns about my five year old daughter.
Thank you so much for taking the time to help us! You have no idea how much it means to me that you were willing to reach out in an effort to help my daughter! I am truly grateful, and I am going to call Dr. Ponsky today as you suggested. I will keep you updated and let you know results as soon as we find out something. Thank you again!
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Serious Concerns about my five year old daughter.
I reached out to Dr Todd Ponsky. He is a renowned pediatric surgeon who is also a hernia specialist. He would like to help you and he feels the situation may be more serious than a hernia. Please contact his office for guidance.
Good luck and please let us know final results.
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Serious Concerns about my five year old daughter.
Thank you for reaching out.
Although this is primarily an adult-focused hernia discussion panel, it seems that many of your child’s symptoms can be translatable to an adult and so I will try to address them here, with the caveat that I am not a pediatric specialist and so many specifically pediatric problems may not be addressed by me.
That said, I will reach out to my pediatric colleagues to ask them to post on this thread as well, to seek their opinions.
With regard to the symptoms, dark stool or black jelly blood in stool is highly concerning for bleeding in the intestine. This may occur with bleeding problems of the intestine and these are almost always painless. They can also occur if there is any pinching of the intestine that is severe, causing intestinal injury that is more than just bruising. The most common cause of this is an abdominal wall or inguinal hernia. If your daughter has this, she must be intermittently incarcerating and even partially strangulating her intestinal contents. This causes pain, obstruction, vomiting, and in severe cases intestinal ischemia which then translates into bleeding of the mucosa of the intestine and thereby dark stool or black jelly like blood in the stool. Another option would be an internal hernia, which is a hernia in between intestines . A similar process can happen.
Ultrasound or MRI may be able to diagnose this, but only if there are symptoms at the time of the procedure, as she may be intermittently incarcerating in a hernia. If there is no direct evidence of hernia, then there may be indirect evidence, such as inflammation or proximal dilation of intestine at the site of obstruction.
If these tests are all normal, and your daughter is very symptomatic, is in the hospital a lot, and/or cannot gain weight or grow adequately, then elective surgery is warranted, with the risk that it may not show anything.
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