This is my little black book, a Moleskine brand blank book that I use to record life details, including, for the past year, health data. I had hoped that by recording and tracking red cell count, blood pressure, various medicine dosages etc. that I’d be able to spot trends and otherwise stay ahead of the game to whatever extent that’s possible.

But, we humans are complex, and trends, when even a few factors are involved are not as clear as one might wish. Even the half-dozen or so parameters I write down (and then sometimes move to a Google Spreadsheet for analysis) get pretty murky pretty quickly. The good news is that I spotted things like a blood pressure spike (probably caused by steroid re-ramp), talked to internist who restarted BP medicine and now we’re fine on that front.

And my mobility is better after a full 2 weeks of increasing steroids, but it’s not a linear thing and we assumed that that would be the case. Fatigue and anemia track, but lag the chemo courses, especially the ‘aggressive’ doses: lots of inerpertration and interpolation required. This data has been useful when meeting with my oncology team – they liked seeing the info: so I think it’s a good idea to do this….

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