Encopresis..what?

I've had three major stresses in my life for a year now.  One I changed at the beginning of this year, and another one just got a name today!  Encopresis.
Hudson is a fabulous middle child.  He is loving, cuddly, and sometimes lacks listening skills.  We have struggled with potty training since he's been potty trained.  We had a glimpse of a great potty trained child from December to March of this year.  What sweet relief!!  The end was here and we could all rejoice!  Until the first warm day which we had in March.  The boys were playing outside and I saw Hudson hiding behind the tractor.  I immediately hauled him inside and to my complete, and utter frustration, he had streaked his shorts.
We have been dealing with this on a daily basis since then and it finally came to a peak this past Friday.  The thunderstorms had kept the kids up the night before, which meant I was up, so I was already tired and cranky Friday morning.  Within minutes of getting Carson on the bus, the first streak came.  I screamed and yelled until I was red in the face.  An hour later, another streak.   I was so angry, that I ended up spanking him.  He was crying, I had started crying and he promised he would never do it again.  Can you believe that 15 minutes later it had happened again?  I couldn't.  I knew I didn't want to spank him again (because that obviously didn't work), but I didn't know what else to do.  I called the pediatrician's office and set up an appointment to see what to do about this.  I seriously thought Dr. Tim was going to go on and on about rewards charts, staying calm, making him clean up his mess, but I knew I wasn't going to leave the office until I had a better answer.   Hudson turns 5 in a few weeks, I know he can do this.
When I picked Hudson up from school, his teacher told me he was complaining about a stomachache.  I couldn't think of better timing since we were heading to the doctors any way.  Within minutes of feeling Hudson's stomach, Dr. Tim said it was encopresis.  He said he could feel the stool in the (now inflamed) intestines, which would cause lots of stomachaches.  The mess in his underwear can't be helped.  It's the stool that is leaking around the blockage and just sort of leaks out.  So what do we do?  Lots of stool softener.  The build up inside his intestines has to go so the intestines can shrink back to normal and we can get back to a normal potty routine.  It's going to be a messy couple of weeks, but I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.  We'll just have to keep an eye on it from now on (now that we know what to look for).
When we had walked out of the doctor's office, everything was wet (including the inside of my car because I had left the sunroof open, doh!).  We must have missed a short, but powerful rain storm.  I couldn't help but think that the rain was pouring down while I was telling Dr. Tim about our struggles, and when we finalized our plan, the sun started shinning.  Nothing like a deep thought about poop, eh?  HA ha!