My stool is fairly soft with the fruits, veggies, and stool softeners, but that first stool seems to be hard and causes me to bleed. Does anyone have any tips? I am trying to recover from a fistulotomy and I feel like that first bit kills me. Thanks!

Hey Rusty,
What stool softener are you using? When I was taking the docusate sodium(colace in the US), I had this problem.
Miralax/ Movicol works the best in my opinion.
Not sure if you had LIS or not but the muscles clenching at the beginning of the BM can make stools seem hard in the beginning and once it relaxes the rest of the bm feels fine...

Dawn wrote:Hey Rusty,
What stool softener are you using? When I was taking the docusate sodium(colace in the US), I had this problem.
Miralax/ Movicol works the best in my opinion.
Not sure if you had LIS or not but the muscles clenching at the beginning of the BM can make stools seem hard in the beginning and once it relaxes the rest of the bm feels fine...

Yea I'm taking an off brand colace, maybe I'll try Miralax. Where can I get it? I live in the U.S.

Give the Miralax about three days to see the best results. I started with the capful- 17g's. You can adjust it up or down depending on how it works for you. Colace didn't hold a light to the results Miralax gave me.
Wal-mart, Walgreens, CVS, any drugstore or grocery store in the US carries it. Never had any problems finding it. I take the generic brand at Wal-mart. I believe it's called Clear-lax.

Just wanted to add my two cents.
I had this problem with Colace (ducoset sodium) as well, and I think taking fiber supplement (citrucel) made it worse. I'm not sure it did anything to soften my stool, actually.
I ditched the citrucel, and started Miralax. No more hard beginning!