Coming off while pregnant — what my obstetrician said

I stopped and did not go back, and I am at peace with it, and I would not present that as a recommendation to anybody. It was my situation and my body.

My prescriber's line was that stopping is not a door closing, and she was right in my case. Going back later was a conversation, not a re-application.

I would gently suggest keeping your journal going through the stopping. Mine is the only reason I know what actually happened in those months rather than what I remember happening.

What Sinéad described happened to me too, in a slightly different order.

My stop was abrupt because of a supply problem rather than a choice, and I want to name that as its own category. It happens and it is nobody's decision.

The circle carried me through the first eight weeks after stopping more than anything else did. Nothing anybody said, particularly. The turning up.

What helped me was deciding in advance what I would do if things changed after stopping, so that I was not making that decision from inside a difficult month.

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.

The grief part surprised me. I had not expected to grieve a medication and I did, for about a month, and then it passed.

I would say do not stop in a difficult week if you can possibly help it. My decision was sound and the timing was terrible and the timing is what made it hard.

What I noticed after stopping was that the habits stayed longer than I expected and then quietly went. That was useful information about which habits had been mine.

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

Coming back to what Bryony wrote further up, because it is the bit I keep thinking about.

My reason was that I no longer wanted to be doing it, which felt like an insufficient reason until my prescriber said it was a perfectly good one.

What Bryony described happened to me too, in a slightly different order.

The thing that made it manageable was that nothing about the decision was final. Reviewing it in three months was always an option and knowing that took the weight out of it.

I stopped twice. The first time badly and alone, the second time properly and with support. The second one is the one I would describe as coming off.

Nobody here is going to think less of you for stopping. That was my genuine fear when I posted about it, and it was completely unfounded.