Distended/Swollen Abdomen - Normal Bowel Movements

My CT scan earlier this summer showed a colon full of stool. I have been complaining about upper right quadrant pain for a few years now, and it seems that having such a slow bowel is the cause of it. My GI recommended miralax to move things along. Another DR recommended sennacot, which is what she uses on her spinal cord patients. I am using a half-dose of sennacot every other night and it seems to be keeping things moving fairly well. The URQ pain is mostly gone. Try a mild laxative and see if you feel better. I think that I have developed motility problems from chronic inflammation, and I think that's fairly common around this forum and the Crohn's forum.

I bought one small bottle and I just finished it, so maybe 2 months? I worry too about "habit forming" but the fact is that my motility issues were not getting better. I think there's some nerve damage or something going on that my colon was just not functioning as it should. I didn't try miralax because even if my bowels were slow, my stool was not hard like a constipated person's would be. Miralax stops the colon from absorbing water from the stool, thus making it easier to pass I guess if your problem is rock-hard stool. But I don't have that problem.

Before I started using senna, and before I eliminated gluten, my major bowel complaints were the URQ pain and the cycles of no bms for days followed by a day or 2 of multiple bms that started normal and ended with very soft stool. I'd be crampy and miserable for all of that time, and then exhausted by the whole thing. I had hopes that eliminating gluten would solve this problem.

Within a couple of weeks of eliminating gluten about half the problem was solved. I no longer had any super soft stool. But I still had the cycles of no bms for 3 days or so, followed by a day of multiple bms. Except now the stools were all formed, and they required some effort from me to pass (although they were still not hard, but they were large). The URQ pain had decreased a bit, but not much.

So I decided after our summer vacation to start using senna. It stimulates bowel contractions. The first few days of using it I felt those contractions and there was more gas, too. But I did move my bowels more regularly, and that has continued to be true. I don't see any tolerance to the senna developing.

I still have slower days than others, but I haven't had those awful crampy days since I started using the senna. I am still menstruating, so part of the slowness I'm sure is due to hormonal cycling (progesterone slows the bowel, so in the last half of any menstrual cycle most women will have slower bowels as progesterone is high then). I am considering a trial of miralax since I finished my bottle of sennacot, just to see what the difference might be.