The leaflet is nine pages of worst cases and I cannot unread it

What I remember most from the first two weeks was how much room it took up in my head. That does fade. It is now something that happens on a Wednesday and I think about it for four minutes.

My honest answer to what the first fortnight was like is that it was mostly admin. Working out where things go, when I do it, and who needs to know.

Please do ask the silly questions here. I asked one about storage in my first week that I was mortified by, and four people answered it kindly, and two of them said they had wondered the same thing.

My prescriber gave me one sentence at the start that I have repeated to about nine people since: if something worries you enough to search for it at midnight, it is worth a call in the morning.

Here, reading, and glad you posted.

The first fortnight was the strangest part for me. Nothing had settled into a rhythm yet and I kept waiting to feel like a person who does this, which took about two months longer than I expected.

A thing I wish somebody had told me: you can ask your pharmacist all of the boring questions without booking anything. Mine spent ten minutes with me at the counter and answered four things I had been too embarrassed to ask.

The first fortnight is also when everybody else is at their most curious, which nobody warns you about. You do not owe anybody an explanation, including people who ask kindly.

Coming back to say that my first fortnight felt enormous at the time and is now a paragraph. That is not a dismissal of how it feels. It is a promise about how it looks later.

Nothing about my first fortnight was interesting enough to write down at the time, and I now wish I had written it down anyway. It is the period you remember least clearly and get asked about most.

You are allowed to find the first two weeks confusing. I read four guides and still stood in my kitchen holding the box like it was going to explain itself.

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

You will read a lot of very confident accounts of the first fortnight. Mine was not confident. It was fine, and it was not confident, and both of those were true at once.

Somebody here told me early on to stop trying to predict how the next week would go, and it was the single most useful thing I was given. I was spending more energy forecasting than living.

The bit that surprised me was how much I wanted to talk to somebody who was two weeks ahead rather than two years ahead. That is what this circle is actually for.