Hello @floridabonnie, I would like to add my welcome to Connect along with @colleenyoung, @legendts and others. The goal of tapering in the words of my rheumatologist (as I remember 🙂), is to taper off as soon as you are able to do it with little or no pain symptoms from your PMR. The rheumatologist normally will recommend a tapering schedule but it can be different for each of us due to the pain. Mine recommended that I keep a daily log and record my dosage and my pain on a scale of 1 to 10. I started with a monthly taper but within a few months I changed to every 2 weeks, then at the lower doses tried to taper weekly but sometimes had to go back up to the previous dose. I think the key is to listen to your body. For me if my pain scale was 1 or 2 I would taper to the next lower dose. If my pain went up on the scale, I stayed the course for a couple of days to see if it would get better. If it didn't get better I went back to the previous dose.

Another thing that will help is to have your doctor write a prescription for 1 mg and 2.5 mg tablets. They make it a lot easier to taper slower with a smaller drop in dosage. My first round with PMR took me 3-1/2 years to go from 20 mg to off of prednisone with the last 6 months going back and forth between 1 mg and 1/2 mg (split a 1 mg tablet) until I could finally stop taking the prednisone with little to no aches and pains.

You might want to write down all your questions to prepare for your appointment with the rheumatologist. There is a website with some tools to help you plan your conversation with your doctor. It has some cards you can print out to plan your conversation - https://patientrevolution.org/visit-tools