Fifteen months and I still take it on a Tuesday out of superstition

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I reduced, held, and then reduced again eight months later, both times slowly and both times after a proper conversation. Neither move was dramatic and both were fine.

This is why I read the boring weeks. Thank you for the boring weeks.

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.

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.

Maintenance made me much more interested in strength than I ever was earlier on, mostly because it was the one thing still visibly changing.

A thing worth saying: my maintenance is not somebody else's. Mine involves a continuing prescription and a yearly review, and there are people here doing something completely different and doing well.

What I did not anticipate was becoming a person other members ask questions of. I still feel like I am making it up, and apparently that never entirely stops.

My maintenance has had two wobbles in it, both around big life events, both of which passed. I mention them because a smooth account would be a dishonest one.