Charting how you feel

How do you mark your preamble to an episode? For me, if I don’t mark stuff down, it’s gone forever. But I’ve yet to find a good way to say “this is how I feel” every day. What ends up happening is that I forget for a long time, until it comes to head. Then I’m sitting here wishing I was good about charting how I feel so I can find the patterns and see if there are triggers to make it better or worse.

I downloaded things on my phone to chart it, but I hate charting it that way, because I hate typing on my phone (C’mon iphone, get swipe!). I don’t want to make a post here every day to say how I feel, because that isn’t helpful, I don’t think, and it makes the bigger posts, the ones I think you want to see, harder to find. I could be way off, but it’s my opinion that most of my readers care more to see someone else going through these weird things we experience, the tests, the symptoms, the medications, the issues with doctors. It prepares them for what may come, what their loved one goes through, or at least shows them that they aren’t alone. I don’t think they (you) want to read that today, I feel like boneless chicken, totally uncooked. I am just flopping around and want to do nothing but bob in a pool and sleep. I don’t think you want to know that going to work has been a complete challenge this week because my fatigue is out of control.

So I need somewhere that I can chart what’s going on. It can’t be something I do before bed, because I’ve already forgotten 40% of my day at that point. All I remember is the tasks I did at work and those I need to do later (if I’m lucky).

I’ve thought about writing a program to do it, and set reminders on my phone for every couple of hours to remind me to update it. It would have the “how I’m feeling” thing as an editable drop down, with a scale. I could enter the weather and what I eat. I could put in my sleep scale from the night before. I could then pull reports from it that would extrapolate all that data for the day and assign it a number. I could then review that number periodically so I could graph trends.

Can you tell I’m a software developer?

But I know I’d spend a couple hours creating that program, and I bet you I’d not use it for more than a week.

Maybe I’ll pick up my paper journal again and write in it every 2 or so hours, see how long that lasts this time. Last time I was a solid week and a half before I forgot it existed most of the time, and when I did see it or remember, I’d just not do it.

I guess stay tuned…!