
It’s July! Who knows where the time goes? I thought this would be a good time to share the progress of my cross-stitched heart-failure symptom tracker, as the first month is now complete. I think it looks great. Who remembers Ceefax? Reminds me of that, aesthetically! 🙂

As you can see, the last few days have been tricky and I’ve been feeling pretty rubbish. I’m finding it difficult, honestly, but I do get spells like that and usually find I just need to ride them out. I’m hoping July will require fewer Xs, fingers crossed.
I do think recording symptoms like this has the potential to be quite useful. For example, I’ve noticed I haven’t used yellow much in the second half of the month and the weather has been hotter and I could be dehydrated, perhaps? So I’ll probably try to increase water consumption a little (carefully, carefully – water and heart failure are not happy bedfellows) and see if that helps.
How is everybody else feeling? Does the warmer weather help or hinder you? I’m loving the blue skies but struggling to walk outside when it’s very hot. Also struggle when it’s very cold, mind you! Maybe spring and autumn will be less busy periods on the symptom tracker. That will be interesting to see!
I’ll try to share another symptom tracker update at the end of July or thereabouts.