Off it for eight months and considering going back

Started 14 January 2025 · 19 replies · 218 hearts · read 3.5k times

BronLincoln, UK · 14 January 2025

1.5 years ago

A question rather than an update: Off it for eight months and considering going back

I have been reading here for a few weeks and have not posted, so this is me posting.

I have written down what has actually happened, in order, because I find that more useful than my summary of it.

Here is where I am. The medication side has been more or less as described, and the part nobody prepared me for is everything around it: what to say to people, how to plan a week, and how to tell the difference between a thing to endure and a thing to raise.

Not looking for a plan. Just company and whatever anyone has found.

FenEly, UK

I did exactly the same and felt terrible about it. You have not done anything wrong.

TedIpswich, UK

Practical, boring answer: write the three questions down before you go in. I have never once remembered them otherwise.

BenediktFacilitatorVienna, Austria

Gently disagreeing with the reply above, or rather adding the other half of it.

Thank you for writing this. I am not going to add information to it. I am going to say that what you have described is very common and very rarely said out loud.

NikoTbilisi, GE

The thing that changed it for me was going slower, agreed with my prescriber. I am not suggesting you do that. I am saying the conversation exists.

12me too 3

GudrunAkureyri, IS

My experience was very boring, which I offer as data. Some of us just get a dull time of it.

SinéadCork, IE

Reading the reply above, I recognised more of that than I expected to.

What helped was lowering my own expectations of the week rather than trying to hold the week together.

TressaSt Austell, UK

Coming back to this a fortnight later to say it settled. Leaving the update because I hate reading threads that stop.

13me too 9

FabianBasel, CH

I am the person who had the frightening version of this. I went in, it was investigated, and it was not what anyone feared. Going in is the whole of my advice.

Birdie BWhitstable, UK

Gently disagreeing with the reply above, or rather adding the other half of it.

Can I gently push back on one thing? Not the substance, just the framing — you have written twice that you should be coping better. Who told you that?

DashSeattle, WA

#10

My pharmacist was more use than anyone. Ten minutes at the counter, no appointment, no charge.

11me too 9

BastianFreiburg, DE

#11

Please do not read the comments under news articles about this. I lost a fortnight to that.

11me too 7

TillyHereford, UK

#12

I asked my nurse the same question and she said something I have repeated ever since: that the aim is to keep you on treatment, not to get you up the schedule.

IdaRotterdam, NL

#13

Similar here, and mine turned out to be a completely unrelated deficiency picked up on bloods.

TanviMumbai, IN

#14

the reply above said something I want to sit with for a second.

I have been in this circle a year and this question comes round every few months. It is not a silly question. It is the question.

GabePhoenix, AZ

#15

Yes. All of this. I had the same in my third month and I remember thinking there was something specifically wrong with me, which there was not.

BramwellRipon, UK

#16

Gently disagreeing with the reply above, or rather adding the other half of it.

Mine lasted about seven weeks and then lifted over a few days. I cannot tell you why. I can tell you it lifted.

DelythBala, UK

#17

Building on what the reply above wrote rather than answering the original question.

Two things that helped me, neither of them clever: small amounts more often, and drinking a lot more than felt necessary.

BenediktFacilitatorVienna, Austria

#18

I want to slow this down a little. There are four different answers flying about and they are all somebody's real experience, which makes them true and not necessarily relevant to the person who asked.

FenEly, UK

#19

I would take that to a clinician rather than to us, and I would do it this week. Not because it is definitely serious — because it is the sort of thing that is much easier to rule out than to worry about.