Keeping A Lyme Log

Perhaps you're not much into journaling or jotting down your daily agonies, but have you ever considered keeping a log of your Lyme symptoms and treatments? If not a daily log, then how about a weekly log?

If your mind is anything like mine, then it often runs on fuzzy mode, which makes memory unreliable for recalling past symptoms and knowledge of what treatments have or haven't worked for you. And trying to assess progress without use of a written history for comparison is to rely not only upon a poor memory, but on a mind that is filled with biases and which may be subject to poor interpretations of past experiences, especially when brain fog or depression are strong. Additionally, if you frequently change your protocol, then it may be easy to miss or misunderstand the effects of a particular therapy on your body. Keeping a log can help correlate symptoms with treatments in a more detailed, accurate way.

Keeping a log doesn't have to be tedious, however. If you are lazy or undisciplined or really sick, consider that keeping track of symptoms and treatments, even once a week or writing a summary once a month, can provide useful reference material for you as you assess your current progress and treatment strategies.

As you chart your progress, making detailed notes of the How and When of the symptoms, as well as their frequency and intensity, is important.
Subtle changes in healing can be missed when you use generic terms to describe your symptoms. For instance, journaling, 'Fatigue and brain fog in the morning for three hours prevents me from reading,' is much more descriptive than writing, 'Today, I have bad fatigue and brain fog' and allows you to recognize progress when, a year later, you still have 'bad fatigue and brain fog' but you are now able to read in the morning.

Correlating therapies with progress can be more difficult, especially if you are doing multiple protocol. Still, it can be useful to keep a record of your treatments, especially supplements, and the changes you experience hours, days or weeks after starting or stopping them.
Doing a graph with columns and rows is one way to track progress, if you don't like to write long paragraphs.

Personally, I didn't start keeping a log until a year into illness, and even then, it was a monthly summary that provided few details on my symptoms and healing strategies. More than once, I've wished that I could better recall how I felt in previous months and how various supplements affected me. Fortunately, as of late I've started a daily log, and I spend just three minutes scrawling out my thoughts. I stick the notebook bedside, where I know I won't forget it!