Big breakthrough with Minifobette!
As I mentioned a couple weeks ago, she'd sort of slipped back down into silence the longer she was on the liquid diet, and we couldn't figure out what was going on. I realized that if nothing else, it had been quite awhile since we'd done a full cleanout on her with magnesium citrate, and that's always been something she responds well to. So we started it... and stuff just kept coming out, and coming out, but in relatively small quantities. And along with the small bits and pieces of terrible stuff, she was losing clear liquids too, and you can't keep that up for very long without a risk of dehydration. So we took the nuclear option--on Christmas Eve, no less--and went at it from the other end with an enema (yes, they make them in pediatric sizes.)
Oh. My. God. The stuff that came out of her was truly unbelievable. She won't sit on the toilet, so you just have to squirt the bottle up there, and let her hang out in the bathtub until she's done. (And then get out the hardcore disinfectant to clean the tub.) First, there was the green liquid, which is what we normally see in her diapers... but then came the bright yellow mucous, the sheer quantity of which seemed to defy the laws of physics. When she was on the antifungals, we would see a little bit of this stuff come out, but never ever like this amount. Twenty minutes later, she was a changed kid. Tons of babbling and awareness. We've continued to do enemas every 3-4 days on her, and she's doing better and better. We're still seeing the mucous, but less each time. At this point she's pretty much back to where she was in the first few days of the liquid diet. We now have about ten words that she'll say with prompting, though none of them have become voluntary yet.
I don't know how regularly we'll have to keep doing the enemas once we get this particular buildup of mucous conquered, nor do we know for sure what caused it in the first place. Usually mucous is a sign of infection, and our best guess is that the liquid diet fed the pathogens to such a degree that the medications were powerless in the face of such a monstrosity. But if you can't kill it, I guess it works just as well to physically force it out, right? It's clear that the enemas get the cognitive results we want, and are a thousand times more effective than the laxatives, not to mention way cheaper ($1.74 a bottle? Are you kidding me?) so I'll be keeping a stock in the bathroom cabinet from now on. I worry on occasion that I sound like such a cruel mother, but then over the holidays my mother-in-law told me that when she was a kid, her parents would routinely give her enemas for constipation, as there weren't as many medical laxative options back then. They're certainly not fun, but they get the job done, and in the long run they're more gentle on the system than habitual use of any medication.
In other news, now that Minifob's having really solid poop again, we were able to do his chelation challenge test. I should hopefully have the results back in another few days, but I'm feeling a lot more optimistic about them than I was. The day after the challenge dose was an incredibly good day for him, and what's more, the weird cyst that he's had in his neck since he was a year old has suddenly shrunk by half. (It's hard to see in photos, but you can see it a couple of times in
this video, most notably at around 40 seconds.) Neck cysts are another one of those things that are inexplicably very common in autistic kids, though I've never heard anyone specifically say theirs went away with chelation. Anyway, I'll post the results when I get them, as I promised to tw.