This Isn’t a Success Story
I want to be upfront about something: this post is not about how I tracked my way to a diagnosis and now everything is fine. That’s not my story. I’m still in it. I’m still tracking. I’m still learning what my body is doing and why.
What tracking gave me wasn’t an answer. It gave me a different relationship with the questions.
That distinction matters because the chronic illness internet is full of stories that end in resolution — the diagnosis that explained everything, the treatment that finally worked, the supplement that changed everything. Those stories are real and valid for the people who lived them. But they can also make you feel like you’re failing if your story doesn’t resolve the same way.
Mine hasn’t. And I started building Penny anyway — not because I figured it out, but because I got tired of the tools being part of the problem.
The Spreadsheet Era
I’ve had bladder and pelvic health experiences since I was a teenager. For most of that time, I tracked the way everyone does at first: inconsistently, reactively, and in whatever format was closest to my hand.
Napkins. The Notes app. A spiral notebook that lived in my purse for about two weeks before I forgot about it. Eventually, a spreadsheet — because at some point you think “if I just organize this properly, I’ll see the pattern.”
The spreadsheet era was ambitious. Columns for time, urgency, pain level, fluid intake, food, stress, sleep, menstrual cycle phase, weather (yes, weather — I was desperate for variables). It was thorough. It was also completely unsustainable.
Here’s what I learned from the spreadsheet era: the problem wasn’t that I wasn’t tracking enough variables. The problem was that the tracking method itself required more cognitive energy than I had on the days when tracking mattered most. During a difficult stretch, I couldn’t fill out a spreadsheet. I could barely form sentences. So the worst weeks — the weeks with the most data to capture — had the least data in them.
My bladder diary was a greatest-hits album of good weeks. Useless.
What Changed
The shift wasn’t dramatic. There wasn’t a single moment where everything clicked. It was more like slowly turning the resolution up on a blurry image.
I stopped trying to track everything and started tracking consistently. Fewer data points, but every day — not just the days I felt capable of a detailed log. Rough data captured in real time beat perfect data reconstructed from memory.
And over weeks, then months, things started to become visible that I genuinely hadn’t seen before. Not because they were hidden. Because they only existed in the pattern — in the relationship between Tuesday and Thursday, between this week and last month, between what I ate and what happened the next day.
Some of what I noticed:
My worst days weren’t random. They clustered around specific points in my menstrual cycle — not the obvious ones. Not period days. A specific window in the second half of my cycle, consistently. I’d been tracking for months before that pattern became visible, because it’s not the correlation you’d look for first.
Certain foods didn’t trigger immediate reactions. The reaction came the next day, which meant I’d been blaming the wrong meals for years. The thing I ate at dinner on Tuesday was affecting me on Wednesday afternoon, and I’d been looking at Wednesday’s food log trying to figure out what went wrong.
Stress wasn’t a direct trigger for me — but sleep was. And stress disrupted my sleep. So the path was stress → poor sleep → worse experiences the next day, not stress → immediate flare. Research from the Interstitial Cystitis Association has documented this kind of indirect trigger pathway. That distinction changed how I thought about management entirely.
None of this was revolutionary medical information. My providers weren’t shocked by these observations. But they were useful — because they gave my providers specific patterns to work with instead of general complaints, and they gave me a sense of agency in a situation where I’d felt powerless for years.
Clarity Is Not the Same as Control
I want to be careful here, because the line between “tracking helped me understand my body” and “tracking gave me control over my condition” is important — and I’m only claiming the first one.
I still have bad days. I still have weeks where everything I’ve learned about my patterns doesn’t help because my body decides to do something new and confusing. I still sit in specialist appointments and hear things I don’t want to hear.
What’s different is that I’m not confused about what’s happening anymore. I might not know why. I might not be able to stop it. But I can see it — in the data, in the patterns, in the trends over time. And “I can see what’s happening even if I can’t fix it” turned out to be a fundamentally different experience than “I have no idea what’s happening and I can’t fix it.”
That’s what clarity does. It doesn’t solve the problem. It changes your relationship with the problem. You stop feeling like the condition is happening to you randomly and start seeing it as something that has patterns — patterns you can document, discuss with your provider, and use to make more informed decisions about your own care.
Why I Built Penny
I didn’t build Penny because I figured out my health. I built it because I spent years using tools that weren’t designed for people like me — people managing complex, chronic, overlapping pelvic health conditions while also dealing with brain fog, fatigue, and the emotional weight of the whole thing.
Every tool I tried assumed I could type detailed notes while in pain. Or remember to open an app at consistent intervals. Or make sense of my own data in real time. Or that my experiences fit neatly into categories designed by someone who’d never had them.
Penny exists because tracking should be possible on your worst day, not just your best one. Because your bladder diary should capture the bad weeks too, not just the good ones. Because the gap between “you should track your experiences” and “here’s a way to actually do that when you’re exhausted and in pain” is the gap nobody was filling.
I’m still tracking. I’m still learning. I’m still looking for answers — for myself and for the community this condition connects me to. Building Penny is part of that search, not the conclusion of it.
I didn’t find a cure. I found patterns. And patterns turned into clarity, and clarity turned into better conversations with my providers, and better conversations turned into feeling like a participant in my own care instead of a passenger. That’s not everything. But it’s not nothing.