Stopping after a gallbladder problem

Mine was a planned stop with my prescriber over about four months. Having a plan made the difference between a decision and a collapse.

The thing nobody told me is that stopping is a process with its own weeks in it. I had expected a date and got a season.

I came off for eight months and went back on, and I want both halves of that on the record because threads that only cover the leaving are only half a story.

Building on what Gudrun wrote rather than answering the original question.

I stopped, and about six weeks later the background hum came back, and that was the part I was least prepared for. Not the physical side. The noise.

What I would say to anybody considering it is to have the conversation before you decide rather than after. My prescriber had two options I had not known existed.

You have described the bit that nobody warns you about.

Honest note: my first month off was much better than I had feared and my third month was much harder. The order surprised me.

The practical thing I got right was writing down why I was stopping while I was still on it. Two months later I could not have reconstructed my own reasoning.

I stopped because my prescriber said so, which is a very different experience from choosing it, and it took me longer to make peace with because it was not mine.

What I found hardest was other people treating it as a failure while my prescriber treated it as a normal clinical decision. Their reaction was the difficult part, not the decision.