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Coming off nights after eleven years

Started 18 November 2024 · 21 replies · 251 hearts · read 3.3k times

OrrinGlasgow, UK · 18 November 2024
1.7 years ago

Something I have been sitting with: Coming off nights after eleven years Not looking for advice so much as other people's experience.

Anyone else navigating this? I feel as though every piece of advice I read was written for someone with a completely different week.

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.

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.

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.

Thanks all. Genuinely.

84

MattNottingham, UK
#1

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

14

PrueChester, UK
#2

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

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.

11

KikiFacilitatorGlasgow, UK
#3

Reading the opening post, I recognised more of that than I expected to.

I will leave this open for a few more days and then add it to the circle's resources, because the answers here are better than anything I would have written.

24me too 4

YannickBrussels, BE
#4

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

9

KezWigan, UK
#5

What the reply above described happened to me too, in a slightly different order.

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.

13

HollyBath, UK
#6

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.

8me too 8

RillaAberdeen, UK
#7

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

12

OrsolyaBudapest, HU
#8

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

9

OssianTromsø, NO
#9

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

10me too 3

TorinBelfast, NI
#10

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?

14

Ollie OPeterhead, UK
#11

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

11

TorrinAberdeen, UK
#12

What the reply above described happened to me too, in a slightly different order.

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

13

NorahDerry, NI
#13

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

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

10

BoazHaarlem, NL
#14

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.

15me too 1

LulaBournemouth, UK
#15

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

11

TobySwindon, UK
#16

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.

7

BrennaEnniskillen, NI
#17

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.

14

HuwWrexham, UK
#18

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

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.

9

BethanPontypridd, UK
#19

Yes to the burping. It is real, it is unbeautiful, and it does settle.

7

KikiFacilitatorGlasgow, UK
#20

If any of this has landed close to home for you while reading, our support resources page lists the kinds of services worth finding. No obligation and no drama.

20me too 9

RenataKraków, PL
#21

It got worse before it got better for me, which I wish someone had said. About ten days of worse.

10