Slow is boring and boring is working

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.

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.

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.

I hold at a step for as long as it is still teaching me something. When a step gets boring, that is usually my sign to talk about the next one.

Somebody asked me whether slow titration is just fear management, and honestly, partly. It is also symptom management and life management, and I have stopped ranking those.

Same here, and I am glad you said it first.

I went back down a step once, deliberately, and it was not a failure. It was the most sensible fortnight of the year and my prescriber agreed without hesitation.

Gently disagreeing with Hal, or rather adding the other half of it.

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.

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.

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.

Reading this properly rather than skimming, which is all I have to offer today.

I would gently add that slow is not the same as stalled. I moved twice this year, both times deliberately, both times after a conversation. That is progress with a handbrake, not no progress.

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.

This is the post I wish had existed when I was looking for it.

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.

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.

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.

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.