The cost conversation in year three

The practical shape of my maintenance is: one review a year, one set of bloods, one conversation about whether anything has changed. That is genuinely all of it now.

What I did not expect was how much of maintenance is about other people forgetting. The interest fades and you are left doing the same thing quietly, which is fine, and is also lonely sometimes.

My prescriber reduced me and we have held there for fourteen months. It has been the most uneventful fourteen months of my adult life and I am not complaining.

Here, reading, and glad you posted.

Maintenance is where I finally had to deal with things the earlier stages had let me postpone. That was harder than any of the physical adjustment.

Year two is the part nobody writes about, and I think that is because it is not a story. It is Wednesdays. Very good Wednesdays, but Wednesdays.

Coming back to this thread a year on to say that the dullness held. Nothing to report, which is the report.

Something that helped: I decided to keep journalling weekly in maintenance even when there was nothing to say. Those entries are how I noticed a slow change I would otherwise have missed.

I have been in maintenance long enough to have had two dull years and one difficult one. The difficult one had nothing to do with the medication and everything to do with my life.

The conversation I found hardest in maintenance was about how long. My prescriber's answer was that we would keep reviewing it, which is honest and was not what I wanted.

Maintenance is where the non-scale things came into their own for me. All the things I noticed in year one turned out to be the things that stayed.