I'm so glad I decided to google this before going to sleep tonight. I was so worried about my son. I thought I had read somewhere that a boy's foreskin should retract on its own (I knew that I should never try to retract it and that when it was ready he would do it himself) around age four. I wasn't really thinking about that, though, when I took my five year old son in to the doctor today because he's ill. The problem is, one of the things that is wrong with him is that, even though he's been good about using the toilet for over a year, suddenly in the last few weeks (my mother thinks basically the whole time he's been ill, and she thinks it is related) he's been having a lot of accidents. He's just turned five this month. Sometimes he'll tell me he doesn't need to go and then five minutes later have had an accident. Once he wet himself three times in one day. So, when his cough wouldn't go away I took him to my ped. I explained all his symptoms including the accidents. He checked his penis and said to me "how does he pee?" because his foreskin is very tight and at first he couldn't even find the opening. We did find a tiny hole. I went with him to the bathroom so he could give a urine sample and observed that the stream is not straight and it is very thin. So the doctor thought that this was causing his accidents and that he would need to be circumcised. I asked him if there was anything else we could do to avoid surgery and he said maybe a urologist would know and gave me the number for one. The sample came back negative for a bladder infection. And he also wants him to get a blood test to check for diabetes. I have been just beside myself worried about him and worried what the urologist would say and terrified of him having to get circumcised and didn't want him to be in pain or ever feel sad he was different from his brother (who is older, and also intact) or had to give something up because...well I am a mother, of course I blamed myself for maybe having done something to cause this!
It is such a relief to read that it's perfectly normal for his foreskin not to have retracted yet! Like I said, other than cleaning him when he was a baby I have taken care not to mess with it (and thankfully the doctor today did not forcibly attempt to retract it, just stretch the sort of tube part gently so he could see better, and my son had no pain). His brother was pretty young when his foreskin retracted (I remember him sitting on his little potty and he called me in to see because he was excited about being able to do it), he must have been 3. I have never had any kind of triumphant call like that from my other son and have never really seen him try to do it. When my husband and I asked him tonight if he could move it he didn't understand what we were asking and kept trying to stretch it away from his body, not pull it towards himself. But anyway, really, thanks to you all for being one of the first hits on my search!
I am still worried though. What if this accident problem persists after he's no longer ill? (The doctor thinks he has bronchitis and prescribed antibiotics and albuterol) Something has got to have caused it because it is completely unusual for him to have so many accidents in such a short amount of time. Maybe i'll need to take him to the urologist anyway. Maybe the urologist will want to circ him and I know now from reading here and some of your links to other articles that that is probably unnecessary. I guess I'm no stranger to fighting doctors (I went to I think, five different ob-gyns and midwives during my second pregnancy before I got into a situation where I was able to be "allowed" to have a VBAC) but...ugh, I hate it. My worst fear at the moment is he does have diabetes, but I don't know if it's completely likely...I haven't really noticed anything else unusual (other than the coughing that led me to take him to the dr).
Thanks for listening, and any input anyone might have would be great. Thank you again for being here.
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