What I keep in my locker

What I would say is to talk to your prescriber about your actual working pattern. Mine adjusted things once she understood it.

The 3am circle here is not a joke. I have used it twice and both times somebody was awake and it mattered enormously.

Something I got wrong was doing it on my first night back. That combination was reliably difficult and moving it fixed it.

My rota comes out a month ahead and I now plan around it properly rather than reacting to it, and that alone fixed most of my problems.

You have said something a lot of us have not managed to. Thank you.

I found the first six weeks brutal on nights and much easier on days, and I timed my step ups for the day blocks after that.

I found that my worst weeks were always the transition weeks, and I now protect those rather than treating them as ordinary.

The fridge at work is not somewhere I trust, so mine never leaves the house, and that decision has removed a recurring worry.

What I underestimated was how much the tiredness compounded. A rough week on top of a rota change was much worse than either alone.

I asked for my review appointments to be after a run of days rather than nights, and it made them considerably more useful.

You have described the bit that nobody warns you about.