Just starting · call recap
The pen in the fridge and nobody touching it
6 May 20249 attendedHeld by Esi
Nine of us, and five had an unopened box at home. That turned out to be the whole hour. We had planned to go round on first-fortnight symptoms and never got there, because when Freya said out loud that she had opened the fridge every day for nine days and closed it again, four other people made the same noise at once. We stayed with the not-starting rather than trying to solve it. Nobody was talked into anything on this call, which I want on the record, because that was the harder discipline.
Where the room started
Braced. Two people had read the patient leaflet twice and could recite the rare adverse events in order. One had a spreadsheet of side effects sorted by frequency and had frightened herself with the bottom third of it. What came out under that, once we slowed down, was much less clinical: this is the first medicine several of them have chosen for themselves rather than been handed for an infection or a blood pressure reading. Nobody is standing over them. As Ted put it, while the box sits there you do not have to have any opinions about how it is going.
What came up
Three practical things kept surfacing and I said very little while the room answered them. Where does the sharps bin come from — the chemist, usually, free, and mine has never asked a question. Which day to pick — one where the two days after it are as much yours as they can be. Whether to tell work — several people had told nobody for months and did not regret it.
Then Kate said the thing that changed the hour. She had cried in the pharmacy, not from sadness, from the relief of a box being in her hand after fourteen months of asking. Three people said they had done the same. Nobody had told anybody.
Where we left it
Two offers, both taken. One, that the box can stay where it is another week while you get used to owning it — nothing expires and there is no clock we can see. Two, that somebody will be on a call with you while you do it, and half a dozen people in this circle have done that for somebody else. Two members took that up before the call ended.
What I asked of the room for next week: answer the question that was asked. If somebody asks whether the tiredness settles, do not build them a dose plan.