Difficulty with bowel movements, advice?

Hospice recommends using smooth move tea, you can get it at most grocery stores. It is senna and works really well. Usually without a lot of effort needed.

We let it brew for 10 to 15 minutes and then you don't have to drink but about 4oz for results.

I am not obsessed. She is. She wants to poop and can't. There is hard stool there thatvshe can't push out.

Great advice below but my dad's palliative care team suggested 1 tsp of olive oil orally and it worked amazingly well. It provided moisture to the dry fecal contents and he was able to expel with very little effort. Try to push drinking water.

Unless you are finding that the poop is staying in the bowel so long that the bowel is removing so much fluid that the stool is going cement, there is little reason for doing this. Poop is like a train, add another car and the first car will move forward. Use stool softner daily to keep it from going hard as cement, and needing disimpacting. You are correct that disimpacting is dangerous, and digging about in the bowel can actually trigger reactions that cause heart problems. Get the advice of Mom's doctor.

My first reaction is that every other day is much too often, no doubt her diet is also quite small so the need to go so often is not as acute. My major regret in the time I spent caring for my mother was the time I spent obsessing about her bowel routine. We tried every diet, laxative, stool softener, enema and even digital stimulation and I know I must have caused her both physical and mental pain in attempting to keep her on some kind of schedule, and I didn't begin to freak out until day 5...( as advised by our palliative care nurse).
What I discovered after she was in the NH was that she obviously didn't need all that fussing, they even discontinued the stool softeners and laxatives she had depended on for decades to no apparent ill effect. She lived another 18 months after moving there and I gradually learned to stop obsessing about her bowels.