The Week I Forgot My Shot

I found it on Thursday

Sunday night is my night. It has been my night since March, and I am smug about it in a way that I now understand was asking for trouble.

That week we had a birthday party, a stomach bug, and a school thing I had genuinely forgotten was happening. On Thursday I opened the fridge for milk and there it was, sitting exactly where I had left it, still in its carton, unmistakably unused.

My first feeling was not concern. It was embarrassment — the particular kind you get when you have been telling people how easy something is.

My friend was right, for the wrong reason

I did what everyone does. I texted a friend who is also on one, and she said: you have four days, you're fine.

She was right that I should take it. She was right by accident, and it took me twenty minutes with the actual leaflet to work out why that mattered.

Because the two medicines do not just have different numbers. They ask different questions.

• Zepbound counts forward from the dose you missed: take it as soon as you can within 4 days, and after that skip it and go back to your usual day². That is her medicine, and that is where her "four days" came from.
• Wegovy counts backward from your next one: if your next scheduled dose is more than 2 days away, take the missed one as soon as possible. If it is less than 2 days away, skip it¹. That is mine.

It was Thursday evening and my Sunday was three days out. Three days is more than two, so my label said take it. I took it that night.

Same answer as my friend, arrived at completely differently — and that is the bit that unsettled me. If I had not opened that fridge until Saturday, my Sunday would have been one day away, my label would have said skip, and her four-day rule would still have been sitting in my phone telling me to inject. One day before a scheduled dose.

A rule of thumb from someone on the other medicine is not portable. It just looks portable when it happens to agree with yours.

What those eleven days actually felt like

Sunday to Thursday is not a missed week exactly, but it made eleven days between doses instead of seven, and I felt every one of the last four.

My appetite came back on the Wednesday, and it came back louder than baseline — not "I could eat" but the old running commentary about food that I had almost forgotten was ever there. That was the part that got me. Not the hunger. The noise.

I ate more those few days. I did not undo anything. The scale ticked up slightly and came back down over the following fortnight, which is roughly what everyone told me would happen and which I did not believe until it did.

And when I did inject on the Thursday, the next couple of days felt like the early weeks again. A bit queasy, a bit flattened. Not badly, but noticeably. I spent Friday wondering whether something was wrong, when apparently a longer gap can just do that.

★ Where I would stop guessing and call

One thing I did not know at the time and would want a friend to know: if you miss two or more weeks in a row, that is a phone call, not a decision to make from a leaflet. My label says that after two or more consecutive missed doses, dose escalation may need to restart at a lower level to keep the gut side effects manageable — and the patient guide says plainly to contact your provider about how to restart¹.

One missed dose is admin. Two or more in a row changes what restarting should look like, and that is not mine to work out in a fridge doorway.

What I do now

I moved the pen to the middle shelf, in front of the milk, because I open that door forty times a day and I cannot not see it.

I put a recurring alarm on my phone labelled with the actual thing rather than something coy, because "Sunday" is not a reminder, it is a word.

And I wrote my medicine's rule in my notes app — not the general idea of it, the actual sentence, including which direction it counts. Because the next time I am standing in front of the fridge at nine on a Thursday, I do not want to be reasoning from a group chat.

The bit I would say to a friend

If you are reading this because you have just found your pen in the fridge: you have not ruined anything. One missed dose is a dose, not a verdict.

But look up your own leaflet rather than asking someone on the other medicine — not because they will lie to you, but because they might be right in a way that does not transfer.

Mine still lives in front of the milk. Nine weeks now, and I have not missed one since — though I have stopped telling people how easy it is.