Appetite signals came back in an odd shape

The thing that caught me out about maintenance was the absence of a finish line. I had built the whole thing around arriving somewhere and then arrived and found there was nothing to do.

I am two years and four months in and my journal entries have got extremely dull, which I now consider the best possible outcome.

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.

I keep one line from my first year pinned in my notes, and I reread it whenever maintenance feels like nothing. It reminds me what nothing used to cost.

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

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.

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.

What changed in maintenance for me was the questions. They stopped being about symptoms and started being about how long, and what happens next, and nobody has a very good answer to either.

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.

Nobody prepared me for the strange flatness of it. Not sadness. Just the absence of a project, after two years of having one.

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.

Coming back to what Cass wrote further up, because it is the bit I keep thinking about.

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.

What Cass described happened to me too, in a slightly different order.

My honest account of maintenance is that it took about four months to stop bracing. I kept waiting for something to go wrong and nothing did, and eventually I put the brace down.

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.

Just marking that I read this properly rather than skimming it.

Recognition rather than advice, if that is any use at all.