Hello,
My 9 year old son has been battling chronic constipation for about 7 months now. We have been in and out of the docs off too many times to count and he has an appointment with a GI specialist this coming April 29. When he gets severely backed up, he normally develops the runs (common in severe constipation believe it or not) and during his last bout I found several skinny, tiny worms around the toilet. Keep in mind that there was poo everywhere around the toilet, it was a mess. The first worm was sorta stuck to the seat along with some poo.

When I first saw it, I thought that it was a thin blade of brown grass (keep in mind it was covered in poo). It was maybe 1/2 in long and flat, but not segmented, maybe 1 mm wide. When it dried out, it was much skinnier. It tapered off to a point and was shaped very much like a pinworm (according to the pictures I have seen online) but it almost looked like it had two hairs on the side of its body (imagine if you had a thin piece of grass and you separated a strand of grass fiber from the middle of the stalk). I was in denial at the time, so i cleaned it up and thought it was something he had eaten. Then I found another, dried whitish one next to the toilet. (Really easy to miss, but I am freaky about clean bathrooms and I clean the floors on my hands and knees.) I began accepting that my son had worms. I also found one in his shower and this sucker slowly moved (folded up on itself) when I held it between my fingers. All worms were uniform in size.

So... off to the doctor we went and they gave him vermox, said they were pinworms. Funny thing, his doc would not give me a prescription to treat the family, so the rest of us used PinX. I told my son that I wanted to see his stool before he flushed, but he did not come to get me. Instead, he told me that he saw a bunch of baby worms in his stool, they were really, really tiny and curled up and they looked like they had reddish heads. He flushed them! I did not get a chance to see them:(

Up until this point I thought I had a yeast infection and I had experienced some little pinching sensations in the rectal area. I always associated these feelings with cleanliness, so I would just hop in the shower. It made sense that I had worms too, although I did not see anything. The pinX helped alot, but I did not see any worms evacuated from my body. I suspected that*my* experience was more psychosomatic since I did not see anything.

Anyhoo, I thought all was great, no more worms until last week. I saw white strings in my poo and upon closer inspection it was revealed that, lo and behold, I think was seeing the same creature that I found during his episode. These strings were well and truly trapped in my poo, it almost appeared that there were tracks in the piece of stool that I found them in. I bagged a sample and called my doctor. He sent the sample off and prescribed vermox, 2 pills a day for 3 days, but said they were probably pin worms again. He would not give me meds for my family.

So.... I have a few questions:

1. Just how big are pin worms? Are they flatish like a blade of grass? Do they taper to a point? Do they actually look like the pictures and can you discern their shape with the naked eye? Can they really get as long as 1/2 to 3/4 inch? What are the little feeler, hair thingies that were sticking out of the side of its body? Would they leave tracks in one's stool (if that is what I actually saw)?

2. Are these even pin worms? I had worms as a child and I remember them being super small, like a single strand of cotton. These worms were far from big, they were uniformly sized, but they were not a thin as a single strand of cotton.

3. I have tried to find an actual picture of a single pinworm that is not magnified, drawn or sketchy in details. The worms I saw did not look like a roundworm, they really resembled the pinworm (both diagrams and magnification), but I thought that pinworms were much smaller, and that you would not be able to easily discern their shape without magnifying them. Does anyone have a picture of a single pin worm or, ew, pinworms on feces? *I cannot believe I am actually asking this, but I am*

4. I have a 5 month old baby and I nurse him. What if these are not pinworms? Will I pass these via breastmilk? If he has worms, how can I treat him? His pediatrician said that there is no treatment for babies under 12 months old. This scares the hell out of my, because *what if these are another, more dangerous type of worm*!?!?!

5. I have two doggies who I am going to deworm. So, if these are not pinworms and they are another type of worm that my dogs also have, how on earth do I decontaminate my yard and home of the eggs? I keep having nightmares of my precious baby crawling around on the floor, inhaling round worm eggs, getting sick and having a doc tell me that he cannot prescribe medication.

6. How can I get my doctors to take me seriously? Both the pediatrician and my doc seem to think that I am overreacting and they simply tell me to watch my stool, my son's stool and wash our hands and linens. Argh...

ON an end note, I am paranoid and freaked out...

I passed something today, but I am pretty sure it was a piece of onion, I fished it out and, for the life of me, it looked like onion (I had onion last night). Who knows! It was accompanied by what I seriously hope was an unchewed piece of mushroom (it was brown like a mushroom with the fanning underside or a mushroom). God, I hope it was mushroom. It is hard to not become paranoid. Reading parasite forums does not help, but sometimes the truth is hard to face.

Thanks and please respond!