How I got through the first fortnight

I would gently say that if you have not eaten properly for days, that is worth a phone call rather than waiting for it to pass.

You have said something a lot of us have not managed to. Thank you.

I stopped everything for six weeks, with my prescriber's agreement, and started again when I could. That was the right shape for me.

What I found hardest was people asking how I was in a way that required a manageable answer.

Picking up Nora’s point rather than starting a new one.

My experience is that routine helped more than anything anybody said. Small, repeated, unremarkable things, done at the same times.

I paused everything and my prescriber was completely supportive and said the timing of a restart was entirely mine.

Anniversaries are their own thing and I now put them in the calendar deliberately so they do not ambush me.

I had to tell my prescriber what had happened, and I nearly did not, and it changed the whole conversation for the better.

What I found was that grief and appetite are tangled in a way nobody had ever mentioned to me, and separating them was not possible.

Toast. For about a month it was toast, and somebody here told me that was fine and it genuinely helped to be told.

Eating went completely for about a fortnight and my GP was more concerned about that than I was, and she was right to be.

Coming back a year on to say that eating is ordinary again, that the grief is not gone, and that both of those things can be true.

My family all handled it differently and food was where our differences showed up, which I had not anticipated at all.