Six weeks, week by week

Date.
Symptom: how often, or how long.
What it stopped: the thing you could not do.
Sleep: how many times you woke.
Anything else: medication, illness, a hard week.

Week 1: choosing

Pick two or three. The ones costing you the most, not the full list. Tracking everything is how people stop tracking anything.

Decide where it lives. Notes app, notebook, spreadsheet, or an app. All of them work; the one you will use twice a week is the right one. Free ways to track symptoms.

Write down where you are starting from. A short paragraph on the last six weeks from memory. It is imperfect, and it is a baseline, and recall will overwrite it otherwise.

Set a fixed moment. Attached to something you already do rather than "when I remember."

Weeks 2 to 5: recording

Two to four entries a week, on days something happened.

Add one line a week saying what the week was like overall, particularly if it was uneventful. A record containing only bad days looks like an unbroken run, to you and to a clinician, and that is rarely what happened.

Record anything new immediately, even if it is not one of your chosen symptoms. New symptoms are the highest-value entries in the whole record.

And do not backfill. Reconstructed entries look like real ones and are not. Keeping a record when you have no energy.

Symptom-specific detail, where it applies:

• Flushes: a count, not a rating.
• Sleep: how many times you woke, and whether you got back to sleep. Sleep and night sweats.
• Mood: instances with a trigger or the absence of one. Anxiety and mood.
• Cognitive: the specific event, not "foggy". Brain fog.
• Joints: morning stiffness in minutes. Joint pain.
• Bleeding: dates, and heaviness in something countable. Periods and bleeding.
• Headaches: each one, with duration and whether there was aura. Headaches.

Week 6: the summary page

One page, and it is what you hand over.

Period covered: [dates]

Flushes: 4 to 6 on most days. Worst in the afternoons.
Sleep: woke more than twice on 31 of 42 nights.
Mood: 11 episodes recorded, 8 of them the day after a bad night.
Joints: 20 to 30 minutes of morning stiffness, most days, unchanged.

What I have tried: [thing], from [date]. No clear change.
What it is stopping: left two meetings, cancelled three evenings,
cannot grip properly in the mornings.

My three concerns, most important first:
1. Sleep
2. The morning stiffness
3. Concentration at work

Questions:
- What would you want to rule out first?
- Is testing useful for someone my age?
- What should I do if this has not improved by the next review?

That page is a consultation. It is specific, it is patterned, it ranks itself, and it ends in questions a clinician can answer.

Lead with the three concerns in the first thirty seconds, because appointments are often around ten minutes and the agenda is set by whatever you mention first. What happens at a menopause appointment. · What to take to your first appointment.

If the appointment is sooner than six weeks

Start anyway. One week of dated entries beats recall, and recall after a bad fortnight reports something other than what happened.

It also sets up the follow-up, which is usually where a decision actually gets made. Between appointments. · When you cannot get an appointment.

HormoneLog holds this record and produces no assessment. No score, no threshold, nothing that interprets it, because interpretation is the clinician's job and the record is what makes their job possible. Why tracking perimenopause symptoms is worth it.

Questions and answers