@bjgrace I'm in your situation of looking at the next med and considering Reclast, so I have no success story to report on it. I do think many people have very few side effects or the side effects subside within a week and most people accept that as ok. Some percentage of people have longer lasting severe side effects that change their lives dramatically for the worse. What we don't know is what is that percentage that suffer that fate. Is it 1 percent or 10 percent, we don't know?
What I can offer is that lower doses with safer dosing schedules are not only possible but shown in studies to work just as well. From a previous post here's what I can offer as a possible way of improving those unknown odds:

"There is strong evidence in studies that lower dosages and altered infusion schedules produce very similar results and in one case superior results to the 5 mg dose of Reclast.
It becomes clear from studying the papers that the motivating factors behind the 5mg yearly dose is convenience, patient compliance, money and they say the greater good for the most people. They do not consider intelligent individualized medicine. Nor do any of these papers report anything other than temporary discomfort as a side effect. None of them consider that a lower dose might be safer.
Here are three papers showing lower doses work just as well:

This one compares 3 different doses and shows that 1mg does well, 2.5mg does best and 5mg does ALMOST as well as 2.5 mg. All three were one dose with result at one year.
https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article/97/1/286/2833555?login=false
The next one alters dosing schedules depending on dosage. Combined with the paper above this is great information. They used dosages as small as 0.25mg quarterly with the same result as the large annual dose. It's behind a paywall but you can get a free account and get three free articles a month.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJMoa011807?download=true
The third one compares 2mg to 4mg and concludes that 4mg is better. If you dig into the details you see that there is a tiny advantage to 4mg in the spine and a tiny advantage to the femur neck and total hip for the 2mg. Hardly what would make me call the 4mg superior and certainly not a significant difference. The difference in the spine is between 2mg gains 4.86% and 4mg gains 5.35%. So a gain of about 5% either dose. As I said it flips the other way with the hips but they do not consider that even though their study shows it.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8420937/ "

Good luck with your choices!