Yes, you might still poop with a bowel obstruction, especially if it's partial, allowing some stool, gas, or even diarrhea to pass, but with a complete obstruction, passing anything becomes impossible, signaling a severe emergency. While some stool might pass in partial blockages, the key symptoms of a full obstruction (obstipation) are inability to pass gas or stool, severe pain, and bloating, requiring immediate medical attention.
A blockage in your digestive system can be: in the small intestine or the large intestine. partial (meaning your bowel is partly blocked and some faeces (poo) can still get through) or complete (meaning it is fully blocked and not even gas can get through)
Pseudo-obstruction
Constipation means hard, infrequent bowel movements and mild discomfort. An intestinal blockage has severe symptoms like not passing gas or stool, intense pain, and vomiting. If you have severe symptoms, get medical help right away.
Intussusception is the most common cause of intestinal blockage in children younger than 3 years old. The cause of most cases of intussusception in children is unknown. Though intussusception is rare in adults, most cases of adult intussusception are the result of an underlying medical condition, such as a tumor.
An obstruction typically feels like severe cramping pain in your abdomen. The pain from a small bowel obstruction is more likely to come in short intermittent waves, occurring every few minutes or so. The pain is more likely to feel concentrated in one place.
The 3-6-9 rule is a guideline for interpreting abdominal X-rays to detect bowel obstruction, stating normal upper limits are 3 cm for the small bowel, 6 cm for the large bowel (colon), and 9 cm for the cecum; diameters exceeding these suggest dilation, a key sign of obstruction, with larger measurements increasing the risk of rupture (e.g., >6cm small bowel, >9cm cecum).
SBO presents with hallmark symptoms of abdominal pain, vomiting, distension, and obstipation. The pathophysiology includes bowel distension, impaired venous return, mucosal ischemia, bacterial translocation, and, in severe cases, necrosis, perforation, and peritonitis.
The most common symptoms of fecal impaction are as follows: Abdominal pain (often after meals) The ongoing urge to pass stool. Liquid stool (most often means stool is leaking around the impacted mass)
The doctor may suspect intestinal obstruction if your abdomen is swollen or tender or if there's a lump in your abdomen. He or she may listen for bowel sounds with a stethoscope. X-ray. To confirm a diagnosis of intestinal obstruction, your doctor may recommend an abdominal X-ray.
Intestinal pseudo-obstruction is a condition characterized by impairment of the muscle contractions that move food through the digestive tract. It can occur at any time of life, and its symptoms range from mild to severe.
Symptoms of a bowel perforation include:
Symptoms of bowel obstruction include:
The constipated poo in your bowel is so hard that you can't push it out. So your bowel begins to leak out watery poo. The watery poo passes around the blockage and out of your bowel opening (anus). The leakage can soil your underwear and appear like diarrhoea.
Persistently gray or clay-colored stools suggest some type of obstruction to the flow of bile.
As the obstruction gets worse, your symptoms may happen more often and become more severe. You may have frequent vomiting, extreme bloating, and intense abdominal pain. These are signs of a complete obstruction, in which stool and gas are mostly or totally blocked from leaving the body.
Others only go once or twice a week. A general rule is that going longer than three days without pooping is too long. After three days, stool becomes harder and more difficult to pass. You may need to take steps to spur your gut into action so you can poop.
Common symptoms include:
In the advent of the faster, easily available computed tomography (CT) scan, more patients are diagnosed by the presence of large fecal matter in the colon and rectum with or without signs of colonic perforation (Fig. 1).
The 3-6-9 rule is a guideline for interpreting abdominal X-rays to detect bowel obstruction, stating normal upper limits are 3 cm for the small bowel, 6 cm for the large bowel (colon), and 9 cm for the cecum; diameters exceeding these suggest dilation, a key sign of obstruction, with larger measurements increasing the risk of rupture (e.g., >6cm small bowel, >9cm cecum).
A bowel obstruction can begin suddenly or may progress gradually over several weeks or days. 2 Before a complete bowel obstruction develops, you may experience some warning signs caused by a partial bowel obstruction.
An abdominal X-ray, which can find blockages in the small and large intestines. A CT scan of the belly, which helps your doctor see whether the blockage is partial or complete.
Multidetector CT has a sensitivity and specificity of 95% for the diagnosis of high-grade SBO and is less accurate in partial obstruction (4,6–8). As with radiography, the hallmark is dilated (> 2.5 cm) proximal small bowel with decompressed distal small bowel and colon (Table 2, Fig 7) (15).
Bowel obstruction, sometimes called intestinal obstruction, requires immediate medical attention. The blockage may be in either the small or large intestines. Very often, the condition requires surgery, either immediately after diagnosis or as soon as the patient is well enough to tolerate a surgical procedure.
To distinguish between SBO and LBO, try to identify the haustra that characterize large bowel. Large bowel also typically has a larger diameter than small bowel, up to 4-5 cm, and often massively dilated in obstruction.