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Carpe Diem


I saw this little notebook and it struck me. I can almost hear Robin Williams whispering "seize the day boys seize the day"

I was looking for a notebook. A place to map out my day to day life to try and figure this all out on my own.

If my doctors have run out of medication to give me that is approved by insurance, and therapies take a long time to see results, I might as well spend my days documenting everything in depth.

Yes, I use Migraine Buddy everyday to track if I've taken medication or the maximum pain I feel and where that pain is located. But, this app doesn't allow me to see what works when.

I mean lets be honest, I may have a migraine that lasts 100+ hours that hits a max pain level of an 8. But what's happening during those 100 hours? Did one pain med work, but only for a few hours? Was I almost feeling better but ate something or stayed up too late, and that caused the pain to return?

So I've made my own "self help" journal:

 
 
Here, I can monitor all the weird shit I want to.
 
I've prefilled through the end of July basically a "fill in the blank" scenario.
 
Starting at the top, I have a pain scale that indicates pain on the annoying as hell 1-10 scale, and matched that up with time on the top. I've decided I'll do dashed lines for when its night time since I really don't know how the pain is unless I'm awake.
 
I've also added below that, a spot to indicate how the weather is and how much sleep I got the night before.
 
Then, I've created a space for "Actions" and separated it by AM and PM. Following this, I have a space for reliefs. This is where I can write what was successful and unsuccessful that I tried throughout the day.
 
At the bottom, I've left a place for notes. Who knows what this will be used for, perhaps I can say if I missed work, or if I think the pain is because of an incoming storm system. Maybe I'll just write if today was good or not.
 
So... What's the goal?
 
My goal is to raise questions. Find out which days are worse than others. Have concrete descriptions of what makes up a good day or a bad day.
 
I've noticed that some days, if I start up my diffuser with this "uplifting" blend of lemon, rosemary, and peppermint, sometimes my migraine will go away. Why? Are mornings like these days when I'm experiencing a migraine hangover? Is the tension in my head really just because I need to wake up or are the essential oils actually helping with fatigue?
 
My old migraine app had this feature that allowed me to adjust pain based on time. This was really helpful as it then gave me an "average pain" for the length of the migraine. My basic chart won't be able to do that, but it'll give me an idea of was this really, really bad for the whole duration, or was one day of it just really bad.
 
Maybe this will help. If not, at least I can say I am actively working towards finding a solution.
 
I may have been defeated by the medical industry but I'm not going to give up just yet.
 
Carpe Diem.
 
A.
 
P.S. Notebook is from Target $9

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