Starting while working nights — what do I do about injection day

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.

Torin, answering your question directly rather than going round the houses.

I would say give yourself permission to be bad at this for a while. I was bad at it for about six weeks and then it became something I did without thinking.

You have not done it wrong. The first fortnight is genuinely a lot of new information arriving at once, and none of the guides can arrange it into a week that looks like your week.

Something that steadied me: my prescriber said the first weeks are for finding out how you respond, not for making progress. I had assumed the opposite and it made the whole thing feel like an exam.

I did not tell anybody for the first month. I do not regret that and I would not recommend it either. It was simply what I could manage at the time.

I came into this circle on day three and did not post for a month. Reading was enough at the time. If that is where you are, that is a perfectly good place to be.

My first fortnight had one genuinely rough afternoon in it and the rest was uneventful. I mention the rough afternoon because if I only tell you about the uneventful part it will not help you when you get one.

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.

I found the waiting harder than anything else in the first fortnight. Waiting to see whether I would feel something, waiting to see whether it was working. The waiting was the whole of my first two weeks.

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.

I read this twice. The second time was for the last paragraph.

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.

Mine started with two very quiet days and then a slightly odd third day, and I had convinced myself by then that something had gone wrong. It had not. It was just the third day.