My insurer wants a faster schedule than my body does

Started 4 December 2024 · 20 replies · 216 hearts · read 3.3k times

FlorrieBlackburn, UK · 4 December 2024

1.6 years ago

Something I have been sitting with: My insurer wants a faster schedule than my body does Not looking for advice so much as other people's experience.

Long one, sorry. I have been chewing on this for a fortnight.

My prescriber has been fine, genuinely. The problem is that I get nine minutes twice a year and there is no version of nine minutes that covers a whole stage of this.

I want to write this down while I am still in it, because I have noticed that I rewrite these stages afterwards into something more sensible than they were.

What I would find most useful is not advice. It is somebody describing what their version of this stage was, and how long it went on for before it changed.

Not looking for a plan. Just company, and whatever anybody found at the same stage.

DoraUtrecht, NL

I have watched people here move at four times my pace and do beautifully, and others move at half my pace and do beautifully. There is no schedule that is correct in the abstract.

TomásFacilitatorLisbon, Portugal

If anybody is wondering whether this was a silly thing to ask: it was not. It is the question that opens this circle every few months and it has never once been treated as small.

19me too 4

BroganCumbernauld, UK

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

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.

HalCambridge, UK

That is a very clear way of putting something I have never been able to put clearly.

HeddaCopenhagen, DK

Reading Tomás, I recognised more of that than I expected to.

I asked my prescriber directly what the cost of going slowly was and she said, in effect, time. That was a trade I was happy to make once it was stated plainly.

IdrisCardiff, UK

The one thing I would say is to write down why you are holding where you are. Six weeks later I could never remember whether it had been a symptom, a work trip or just nerves.

GwennoPwllheli, UK

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.

BrammyBelfast, NI

Hedda — yes, and the bit that took me longest to accept was the next part.

Going slowly did not stop things changing for me. It just meant the changes arrived one at a time and I could see each one.

GwynethAberdare, UK

The thing that changed my mind about pace was noticing that my worst fortnights all followed a step-up I had not really been ready for. That pattern was in my own notes.

GwendaEbbw Vale, UK

#10

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

Nine months at one step here and my prescriber has never once suggested moving. She said the schedule is a scaffold and I am not obliged to climb it.

FlorrieBlackburn, UK

#11

My prescriber described the aim as staying on treatment comfortably rather than reaching a particular step, and once I heard it that way the pressure evaporated.

DoraUtrecht, NL

#12

Gwenda has already said most of this and I want to add the one part that was different for me.

What I found hardest was other people's timelines, not my own. Once I stopped reading week-by-week accounts elsewhere, my own pace stopped feeling like a deficiency.

BevanSwansea, UK

#13

I found I needed about three weeks at each step before I knew what that step was like. Two weeks always gave me a half-formed impression that I then acted on.

BroganCumbernauld, UK

#14

Somebody in this circle described their pace as "geological" and I have thought about that phrase very fondly ever since. Mine is similar and nobody minds.

9me too 2

HalCambridge, UK

#15

I have read this twice now. Thank you for writing it.

HeddaCopenhagen, DK

#16

The thing that finally let me relax was realising that staying put is an active choice with a reason behind it, not a lack of a decision.

IdrisCardiff, UK

#17

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.

10me too 7

GwennoPwllheli, UK

#18

Hal, thank you for that. It gives me somewhere to start from.

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.

TomásFacilitatorLisbon, Portugal

#19

Something worth noticing whenever it happens in a thread like this: somebody puts down the difficult version rather than the tidy one, and nobody flinches. That is not automatic and it is most of what we are for.

GwynethAberdare, UK

#20

What worked for me was agreeing a review point rather than a step-up date. We would look at it in eight weeks and decide then, which took the whole thing out of my head in the meantime.