Quest for Fiber

Between the steroids, painkillers and God knows what else, cancer treatment can, for lack of a better phrase, issue a cease and desist that cannot be overruled. Despite all the Lifetime Movies of the Week that offer a melodramatic take on cancer, you never see a cancer patient emerge triumphant from the bathroom with a wide smile on their face, haoled by beams of sunlight as harps and the chorus of a thousand angels herald a successful BM.
But there is hope. After a few weeks of torture, one becomes intimately familiar with fiber in all its forms. There's the Metamucil approach, in which you simply drink a glass of odd-tasting water. There's the uptake in vegetable consumption. There's exercise. There's laxatives. There are fiber-rich foods. You can eat as much fiber as you and all your respective bystanders can handle.
And then there's Fiber One.
I don't know who came up with the concept of Fiber One, but it's a good one: pack as much fiber as you can into whatever cereal-based carrier you can find, coat it in chocolate and call it good. It's not bad. It works for a while. For a brief, shining moment, I almost considered applying for a job as spokesman.
But it offers diminishing returns. After the honeymoon period, I was on the hunt for something more reliable, something that didn't require the rental of a power washer after the proverbial smoke had cleared.
That search ended after a short conversation with a nurse. Her recommendation: Senokot.
That might not seem like a blog-worthy post, but believe me, it is. This was just one of the many small but crucial details that never make it into all those magazines in the waiting room or the vague pamphlets they give you.