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The first twelve weeks

Is this tiredness the medicine or am I actually ill

Started 14 August 2025 · 7 replies · 219 hearts · read 3.1k times

PippaTruro, UK · 14 August 2025
11 months ago

Week seven. Truro. I am so tired that I sat down on the wall outside the Co-op last Tuesday, not because I needed to, just because the wall was there.

It is not sleepy tired. I sleep fine, arguably too well. It is the sort of tired where my arms feel like somebody else is operating them and reading a page takes three goes. I have been putting it down to the medicine because the timing fits, and then on Sunday my sister said, very reasonably, or you could be anaemic, you have been tired since March, and I realised I had stopped considering any other explanation about five weeks ago.

Which is a thing I would like to flag for other people in here, actually. Once you start one of these, everything that happens to your body gets filed under it. Sore knee? The medicine. Bad mood? The medicine. I have not had a single ordinary illness since May because I have attributed all of it to one cause.

I have a phone appointment on Monday. I am mostly posting to ask what people asked for, and whether the fatigue did settle for you, and how long you gave it before you went and got looked at properly.

73

TomásFacilitatorLisbon, Portugal
#1

Pippa, the observation in your third paragraph is one of the most useful things anybody has said in this circle this month, and I would like people to steal it.

Everything gets attributed to the medicine. It happens to almost everyone and it can delay ordinary diagnoses by months. The medicine is a plausible cause of fatigue in the early weeks and it is also not the only cause of fatigue in the world.

Monday is the right move. I will not tell you what to ask for — that is your clinician’s job and they may want quite different things — but people here have often found it useful to go in with a timeline rather than a theory. When it started, whether it is constant or patterned, what you have and have not been able to eat and drink, whether anything else changed. A timeline lets them think. A theory invites them to agree with you.

44me too 9

HattieExeter, UK
#2

Chronic fatigue plus this, so I have spent years distinguishing kinds of tired, and the one you describe — arms operated by somebody else, reading three times — is worth taking seriously rather than tolerating.

I am not saying it is anything. I am saying that tolerating tiredness is a skill a lot of us have far too much practice at, and that practice is how you end up sitting on a wall outside the Co-op deciding it is fine.

37me too 12

SolomonManchester, UK
#3

Bloodwork nerd, reformed. I had exactly this in month two, decided it was the drug, and eight weeks later a routine set of bloods found my iron was on the floor. Not caused by the medicine as far as anyone could tell. Just a separate ordinary thing that I had stopped looking for.

Sorted itself out over a few months with what my GP recommended, and the tiredness lifted in a way that made it obvious in hindsight what had been going on.

31me too 7

GillyWorcester, UK
#4

Nurse, terrible at taking my own advice. Two dull things that matter more than they should: are you drinking enough, and are you actually getting food in. A reduced appetite plus a hot August is a very reliable route to feeling wrung out, and it looks a lot like something worse.

Not instead of Monday. As well as.

22me too 5

OttolineEdinburgh, UK
#5

Long words, short energy. Mine settled around week ten and I want to be honest that the settling was gradual and unremarkable enough that I did not notice it happening. I only knew because I had written walked to the postbox and had to sit down in June and by September I had stopped writing that sort of sentence.

26me too 6

KezWigan, UK
#6

Shift work, two jobs, one very tired woman. I have no useful data because I cannot separate any of my tiredness out from the rest of my tiredness. But I will say the wall thing is not silly. I have sat on a bollard in the retail park. There is no shame in the bollard.

24me too 8

PippaTruro, UK
#7

Went Monday. Bloods taken Wednesday, results on Friday, and I am borderline on one thing and being followed up in six weeks, which is not a story with an ending but it is a story with somebody else holding it.

The timeline-not-a-theory advice worked, by the way. She listened for a good four minutes, which I understand is a lot.

35me too 3