Just starting · call recap
Everything you were told before you started
9 March 202612 attendedHeld by Esi
A theme call. I asked everyone to bring one thing they were told before starting that turned out to be wrong, and one thing that turned out to be exactly right. It went better than I expected — mostly because the wrong things were funny and the right things were quite hard, so the room got to laugh first and then be serious, which is a much easier order.
What turned out to be wrong
That you will not be able to eat. Several people had braced for the whole apparatus of eating to stop and instead found a much smaller, odder change: certain smells, certain textures, tea of all things. That you will feel it working immediately. That the injection hurts. Brammy had been told by a colleague that he would be in bed for a week and had booked the week off, and spent it painting a fence.
And one that made everyone go quiet: that this is the easy way. Four people had had that said to them, twice by clinicians.
What turned out to be right
Two things, unanimously. That the tiredness is real and arrives without warning, and that people around you will have opinions you did not ask for. Tinuke said the second one had cost her more than any symptom — two food cultures at her table, both with strong views, and no script for either.
The other one, from Perdy, who is nine months in: whatever you decide about telling people, decide it before you are standing in a kitchen being asked.
Where we left it
I asked the newer members what they wanted from this circle over the next month and the answer was, almost word for word, the same thing every cohort asks for: somewhere to check whether a thing is normal without being handed a plan. So that is what we will keep doing. The same five questions come round every week and we answer them again every week, because for whoever is asking it is the first time.