What do most of you do to forestall diarrhea?
Mother seems to have diarrhea often. Her internist says that, as people age, their digestive system don't work properly for this or that reason. He suggested giving Imodium every night, the liquid form, which was a lower dosage than the pill form, as a sort of maintenance. I tried it, but then I found myself trying to fine tune it, because aside from diarrhea, she will sometimes be constipated. Myself, I might disagree with the constipation, because she tends to expect that it must happen every day. Even if she's going, if it's not but a little here and a little there, she's not happy. This ends with her wanting an enema, which I will delay as long as possible. We even cut out dairy, and it seemed to help some, although not entirely, but she just keeps trying to get the dairy back in her diet. It seems with her, it is a very fine balance, and very hard to maintain. Anybody else have issues with this sort of thing, is this common among the elderly and, if so, what are you doing, that is working? Many outings have been cut short, due to bouts of this, I have given her imodium before an outting or lately, pepto bismol.
More recently, when she was taking the wrong antibiotic, she had pretty severe diarrhea. Searching online, I came up with some suggestions. First off, the article said that if she has the diarrhea due to the antibiotic, that her body is trying to get rid of it, so it should not be stopped. It advised against imodium, in this case, and suggested pepto bismol. It said that the pepto bismol would slow it down, but not totally shut her bowels down, like imodium, so that she would continue getting rid of whatever she needed to be rid of. Then I found something called BRAT ... Bananas, rice, applesauce, and toast, which are suggested to help stop the diarrhea and sooth the intestines I suppose. I wonder if eating those foods on a regular basis would help forestall it? It would be difficult working that in, let me tell you, she's so danged picky and often obstinate when it comes to what she eats. We've been trying new recipes, lately, since her favorite is southern and I'm not good at southern, and luckily she's liked each one.
We were coming back from somewhere when the urge hit my dad. I swung into a QT and got him out of the car but he didn't make it. He stood by the hood of the car with such a pained look on his face, I'll never forget it. I ran into the store and begged for a roll of towels and tried to clean him up the best I could. It was coming out of his pants leg into his shoes (sorry to be so graphic). I papered the entire front seat with towels and got him home but from the garage to the bedroom was a trail. Then there was the bathroom to clean up. It was an all day task. From then on when we'd go out I'd make sure he was wearing Depends (even though he had them on that one time) and I stockpiled my car with incontinence supplies: Extra Depends, wipes, a sheet to lay down over the seat and then a quilted pad to go on top of that plus some plastic from Home Depot to lay on the floor of the car. It might have seemed excessive but I saw first hand what can happen. Cleaning up the house was bad enough without having to then move on to car clean up.
I wish I had some magic pill that would work but my dad had this problem for the rest of his life. Not all the time but he'd have 2 or 3 days in a row of diarrhea and none of the remedies I tried ever worked. We also talked to the Dr. about it and he suggested immodium which I had already been giving my dad and the Dr. tweaked his meds a little but the issue never really went away.
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