It’s been quite awhile since I posted a chart.

I actually gave up keeping track for a couple of months at the beginning of the year. When I started, it never crossed my mind that I’d still be using them after 12 months. I just assumed I’d better by then, or at least so far along that I’d no longer need them. Didn’t turn out that way.

When I started the charts, I created them in Adobe Illustrator. It’s a graphic design program that I’m very familiar with from my day job as a Creative Director. They were relatively easy to update, but they still took a lot of time to manage and version out each month. I decided that after December 2008 it was just too much to keep up so I dropped them. However, after three months, I decided to pick ‘em up again, but with the goal of making them easier to manage even if that meant making them less pretty.

I started experimenting with organizing my data in Microsoft Excel. This is what I’ve ended up with.

I track a series of 10 different condition categories and within each category there are several symptoms — 33 as of right now.  I based the categories and symptoms loosely on a questionnaire that my old LLMD gave. I rate each symptom every day on a scale of 0-10 everyday. I don’t really have a specific rating system for the scale (which I know skews the data), but, generally speaking, zero means it’s non-existent and 10 is severe enough to keep me in bed for the day. Luckily, I rarely get symptoms over seven. Generally, things seems to hover between four to six.

The beauty of Excel is that once I get the numbers in for each day, I can then cut it up any way I like. I have it set up to produce 14 different charts for me off of one table of data. If I was more adept at Excel I’d probably have more, but my knowledge of the application only goes so far. You can write complex formulas to run tasks for you automatically, but my scripting ability is poor.

Here are the different charts

1: Month to Month Comparison

This looks at averages across the categories and plots the results so that I can (hopefully) see a trends over months. As you can see, I’ve actually been using this format for four months now. Unfortunately, the trend seems to be going up instead of down. This is due in some part to a reshuffling of symptoms within the categories. I also swapped out some symptoms from my LLMD’s questionnaire that I’ve never had. With less numbers for the chart to average, some of the overall values went up.

2: Daily Symptoms

This is the chart I add my numbers into daily. It might look overwhelming, but the whole process of opening the file, adding in the data and closing it takes roughly three minutes. Sometimes I also just write them down and then enter them into the document a few days at a time. Pretty simple.

3: Daily Treatments & 4: Daily Exercise

The Daily Treatment chart has turned out to be a pretty valuable one. I use it to keep track if how well I follow my med and supplement regimen. A “Y” is for “yes” I took it that day, a “N” is for “no” I didn’t and and “S” is for I took “some” of it — basically I took it in the morning and not in the evening (or vice versa). As you can see from this chart, I haven’t been doing a very good job. A lot of the “N”s in July are because I took a break because I was herxing my ass off, and then later because my new LLMD told me to stop some meds and supps.

Daily Exercise is my favorite chart. Unfortunately, you can see that in July I was off running for a couple of weeks. I tweaked my Achilles Tendon in my left foot so I’ve been resting it and not running. You can see that I switched to the bike and have been putting in a lot miles there — though not as many as I’d like to.

I also keep track of my resting heart rate. This is something I’ll discuss in an upcoming post. It’s not as low as it use top be, but it’s still very healthy.

5: Daily Averages — Symptom Category

This is essentially the table in the second chart represented in a picture. It takes an average of each symptom category everyday and plots it in this line graph. Looking at it this way makes it easier to see trends and the over all experience I had that month.

6-15: Daily Totals — Symptom

The remaining 10 charts plot the daily results from each symptom and are organized by category.

Analyzing the results

A pretty shit month, July was. I write the overall upward trend of the month to two things. (1) stress and (2) going off my meds.

The stress comes from work and home life. I picked up a ton of freelance work in July and I’ve had a pretty tough time staying on top of it all. I had to pull a couple of late nights to meet deadlines and be really creative about how I scheduled things. Even if I had been perfectly healthy I would have had a hard time with all this, but being foggy and having trouble concentrating multiplied by the fact that I’m sometimes in a world of self-doubt about whether I can meet what’s expected of me really increases the challenge.

The home front has been a challenge too. My wife’s picked up a ton of work as well. This is all good for us as our bank account was starting to really spiral downwards, but it’s also tough on us as we deal with stress in almost the opposite manner. I get calm and she get’s frenetic and we become like magnets with matched polarities.

Our 4.5 year old daughter is also out of school and, because our schedules are so varied and crazy, she’s not in a camp or regular day-care set up. Every week we have to try and figure out what we’re doing to entertain her and who’s taking there, picking her up, watching her after wards etc. It’s insanely stressful on me and it makes it tough to manage my work, trying to be well and my over all energy level.

Hopefully, August will be better.

December was pretty poor. I started off on the 1st feeling better than I can remember feeling for a long time, but it all quickly went down hill after that. I had a couple of weird days where things flared for no reason. Then, on the 16th I had a minor, non Lyme related health crisis that put me off everything for about 10 days. It was a very stressful time and I generally felt like shit emotionally. This translated into feeling like shit physically.

The numbers tell the same story. Most things are up over November's numbers — brain fog and fatigue markedly so. However, I attribute the fatigue numbers to an increase on exercise activity. I joined a gym and started running more and doing some strength training.

Read the long form details here.

Download a PDF of this file here Download 12_december.pdf (85.0K)

This is a better picture than recent months. August and September were really ugly with lots of symptoms spiking all over the place. I'll post the specifics for October in the monthly wrap up.

One change I made to the design is kind of revealing… I now total up the values of each symptom and then divide the result by the number of days in the month thus creating an average for each symptom. I then insert this average at the top in the colored boxes.

This month is the first time I'm posting a chart with this number at the top, but I went back and did it for all of my past charts. It's interesting to see the wax and wane of different symptoms across time. This month actually has some of the lowest averages since I started treatment. Hopefully that means I'm getting better. November will tell, I guess.

As always… download the PDF of this chart here and learn more about them here.

September was one of the worst months I’ve had recently. Pretty sucky all around. I got wickedly depressed in the early part of the month, but slowly came out of it towards the end. I think it was a combination of herxing off the new meds Dr. R prescribed at the end of August and the fact that September 24th marked the one year anniversary of being sick.

I’ll explain more in my monthly wrap up.

As always, you can download a PDF of this chart here. Download 09_september.png (153K)

Or learn more about my charts here.

Again, half a month late with August. Busy, busy, busy.

All in all a pretty crappy month. Hit a really rough patch in the early part of the month. This was due to over doing the running. I’m coaching a group who are training for the New York City Marathon in early November and was trying to train up along with them. I didn’t expect to get up to their longest run of 20 miles, but I was hoping to get up to half marathon distance (13.1). "Halfs" are my favorite distance to run.

I got in a long run of 9 miles on the 2nd and another of 11 on the 9th, but as you can see my symptoms all increase along with the miles. This is all on top of 2 or 3 shorter runs a week of 5 to 7 miles. I was probably doing 20-22 miles a week. My old weekly base.

It was too much, but I’m still glad I did it. I needed to know where my limit was. I just won’t be running that many miles again any time soon. I’ve cut it way down to whatever my beginner running group is doing plus a short run with my marathoners. Probably around 13-15 a week; and much of that is broken up into slow intervals of a mile or so while working with the beginners. It’s enough right now.

Later in the month, Dr. R switched up my drugs. That threw me down again pretty hard. I’ll write more about that in the monthly summary.

Download a PDF of this chart here.

Learn more about my charts here.

The section of this blog that gets the most traffic is the Symptom Chart category. People seem to have strong reactions (in a positive way) to the manner in which I try to visually track the ebb and flow my symptoms. I find this highly gratifying as they’re both informative yet fun for me to make. Several people have emailed/told me that they wished they could do something similar to track their symptoms and better convey how they’re feeling to their doctors. This has started me wondering… should try and take the idea to the next level. What do you think?

The manner in which I create and update my charts right now is pretty complex if you’re not a graphic designer. I created a multi-layered and preciously designed template in Adobe Illustrator CS3. Then, each month, I duplicate it and adjust the data I’ve collected for each day. An impossible task for someone who’s not an Illustrator expert, but there’s an easier way. I’m seriously considering building a simple application that I could open, type a few numbers into for the day and submit my daily values. The application would then draw all the bars, dots and other visual elements. If done right, it could actually become fun… or at least less annoying… to keep track of things over time.

The idea came to me after remembering an old application created by the designers at Cuban Council called Moodstats (shown above). Moodstats is a cute little desktop application. Dubbed your "One-Stop Personal Journal Mood Diary Organizer & Recorder" it basically allowed you keep track of your moods over a period of days, weeks and months. These could then be compared to friends and/or the public average. Kind of a social networking tool back before there was Facebook, MySpace and Bebo.

Anyway… at the time I thought it was genius and I used it for several months. The novelty wore off after awhile, but I think that since my Lyme doesn’t seem to be going away any time soon that I would continually use something like this. Especially if it utilized some of the newer technologies available today. Maybe there’s an application for my iPhone, or a widget for my Mac. Maybe I could text message my symptoms in while I’m away on vacation. The ideas are pretty limitless.

Of course, once it became simple enough to use, I’d share it with people and offer it up for download. I guess I’m just wondering if people would really, really use it? It’s a lot of effort to go through just for myself, but if others are interested I might consider putting up the effort. If you have any thoughts on this, please comment below or shoot me an email at chronictriathlete (at) gmail.com. Thanks!!

And… here’s July. Only half a month late. I’ve just been so busy that it’s hard to keep up.

July was rough. As you can see, the first half of the month was really good. In fact around the 4th or 5th I had the best day I’ve had since I started feeling sick. My brain fog was very low and all other symptoms were greatly diminished. I was really starting to feel hopeful.

I’d also been running and riding a lot more, both with great tolerance. I’m coaching an NYC Marathon training group and had been able to get out and do the long runs of 7 and 8 miles without any trouble.

Sadly, around mid-month when I took my 5 days of Flagyl all the good feelings came to a halt. This was my 2nd round of the "cyst buster" and I felt far worse than I had during the previous round. Everything spiked. Particularly my neuro symptoms — brain fog, tingling, etc. It sent me into a wicked spin of depression and self-doubt. I also started doubting that Lyme is the true cause of what I’m dealing with. Yeah, I believe I have it, but I think there may be something else at play too. Maybe a virus or something.

Anyway… it was an unpleasant month. Hopefully August end on a higher note.

Download a PDF of this chart here.

Learn more about my charts here.

As I was getting ready to post my July chart I noticed that my June chart post never went live. I created it and set it to post while I was away on vacation in Cape Cod. Somehow it disappeared from my pending post list, but never went live. Weird.

Anyway… here it is. June, if I can even remember back that far, was a pretty good month.

You can download a PDF of this chart here.

For more info on my charts, click here.

Once again, late with this. As simple as it is to update for me I do let it slide from time to time. Sometimes I have to go back and look at my calendar, see what I was doing and then adjust the bars accordingly.

I keep improving the design too. That too slowed me down. I changed the green "sore throat" bar to be "sleep" since I rarely have sore throats anymore — basically never. Sleep on the other hand is a constant issue. I also changed the way I record my meds. Now it’s 3 dots per day. Each dot indicating a dose of medication. The dosage is to the right next to the name of the drug. 100/100 means 100mg in the morning and 100mg in the evening. I’m not currently taking anything at lunch.

In this chart you can clearly see how switching medications increased my symptoms. I started Dr. R’s treatments around the 19th. Everything goes up after that.

You can download the PDF here 05_may.pdf (168.1K)

For more info on these charts click here.