Baltic availability is a lottery

Started 24 April 2025 · 17 replies · 186 hearts · read 2k times

RomyVienna, AT · 24 April 2025

about a year ago

A question rather than an update: Baltic availability is a lottery

Anyone else here in my part of the world? I would like to compare notes.

I have read the guides here, which were more useful than anything else I have found, and I still have a question they do not cover.

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.

What I keep tripping on is not the physical bit. It is the not knowing whether what I am experiencing is normal, and having nobody to ask who is not either selling something or frightened for me.

Thanks all. Genuinely.

HéloïseGeneva, CH

The phrase that unlocked my appointment was asking what specifically she wanted me to watch for. It moved us from reassurance to a plan in about thirty seconds.

NoorFacilitatorSingapore

Gently: you have apologised three times in a post where you have done nothing that requires an apology.

BodilÅlesund, NO

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.

IdaRotterdam, NL

the opening post — yes, and the bit that took me longest to accept was the next part.

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

9me too 6

StellanMalmö, SE

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

PolaGdańsk, PL

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.

HeddaCopenhagen, DK

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

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.

12me too 1

LeniLeipzig, DE

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

OrsolyaBudapest, HU

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.

LinneaTurku, FI

#10

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

OdessaLviv, UA

#11

Different experience here, for balance. Mine did not improve and in the end I stopped, and that was the right call for me. Both outcomes exist.

YannickBrussels, BE

#12

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

No advice, just recognition. That sounds exhausting and I am sorry you are in it.

RenataKraków, PL

#13

I keep a two-line diary and it is the only reason I could answer this question about myself. Worth starting even now.

GilTel Aviv, IL

#14

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?

11me too 1

LenaMunich, DE

#15

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

6me too 9

NoorFacilitatorSingapore

#16

Before anyone offers a remedy: what has been described here is on the list of things that need a clinician today rather than a thread. I am going to be firm about that, kindly.

TheaBergen, NO

#17

the reply above — yes, and the bit that took me longest to accept was the next part.

I am about four months behind you and I have been dreading exactly this, so thank you for writing it down before I got there.