Injection day anxiety is worse than the injection

A small thing that made the whole stretch easier: I set one calendar reminder for the day before, not the day itself. Being reminded on the day was always slightly too late to be useful.

I want to say plainly that my first twelve weeks contained one week I would describe as bad. One. The other eleven were somewhere between uneventful and quietly encouraging.

I asked here in week five whether I should be further along, and somebody replied asking further along than what. I did not have an answer, and that was the answer.

The weekly rhythm of this circle carried me through the first twelve weeks more than any single piece of information did. Turning up on a Thursday to say a small thing was enough.

Twelve weeks in I finally understood that the steep part is the learning, not the medicine. Once I knew how my own week worked, everything got quieter.

What I would tell my week-one self: the first twelve weeks are not a trial you pass. They are a period during which you find out how this works for you specifically.

Halfway through I stopped reading anything outside this site and my own prescriber's advice, and my anxiety dropped noticeably within a fortnight. That was my single biggest change.

This is the post I wish had existed when I was looking for it.

I reread my own notes from week two recently and I sounded genuinely frightened. I had forgotten that. Twelve weeks does more than I gave it credit for at the time.

The most common question in this circle is some version of "is this normal for this stage", and the honest answer is usually yes, with the caveat that if it worries you, ask somebody qualified.

Weeks three and four were when I stopped waiting for something to happen and started noticing things that already had. Different way of looking, same twelve weeks.

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

Coming back at the end of my twelve weeks to say it was mostly ordinary. I wanted to leave that here, because when I was in week three every account I found was dramatic in one direction or the other.