Three weeks at each step instead of four and it changed everything

Going up slowly meant I could actually tell what each change did. When I moved faster at the start, everything happened at once and I could not attribute anything to anything.

Hedda, I have been where you are and I would rather say so than stay quiet.

Every step up for me came with about ten days of adjustment and then nothing. Knowing that the ten days were coming made them much easier to sit through.

Whenever somebody new arrives worried about being slow, I say the same thing: nobody in this circle is going to be impressed by speed, and nobody is keeping score.

That is a kinder way of putting it than I have managed about myself.

My honest reason for going slowly is that I have a job I cannot be unwell in, and that is a perfectly respectable reason that I no longer apologise for.

Slow titration is not the cautious version of this. For some of us it is simply the version that works, and I have stopped framing it as a hedge.

My prescriber and I settled on longer gaps between steps and shorter gaps between conversations, which I would recommend to anybody who finds the schedule stressful.

Coming back a year later to say the slow route held. I am still on treatment, still comfortable, still having ordinary weeks. That was the entire point of going slowly.

I have been at the same step for eleven months, agreed with my prescriber, and it is the best decision I have made in this whole business. Slow was not a compromise, it was the plan.

The schedule on the box is a default, not a deadline. My nurse said that in my second month and it reorganised how I thought about the whole thing.

I stayed where I was for four months because it suited me there, and the only pressure to move came from me. Not from my prescriber, and certainly not from anybody here.

Quietly agreeing from the other side of the country.