Printable Symptom Diary (Free PDF)

Appointments are short and symptoms are easy to under-report once you are in the room. This sheet is built for the week or month before one: eighteen rows with seven columns each, covering the date, the time of day, the symptom itself, how severe it was, how long it lasted, a possible trigger and what, if anything, helped. Written at the time, those columns make a pattern that memory usually flattens.

The header has fields for your name, what you are tracking, the appointment date and the clinic, so the sheet identifies itself if you hand it over or it ends up in a file. At the foot, a panel headed questions to ask at my appointment gives you four checkbox lines, because the question you wanted to ask is the one that disappears while you are getting your coat.

Severity is written out of ten in your own judgement; it is your own scale rather than a clinical score, and nothing on the sheet interprets it or sorts your entries into categories. All 138 fields are form fields, so the diary can live on a phone and be printed the night before the appointment, or be printed blank and carried in a bag with a pen. It is one page in US Letter or A4, and a second copy picks up where the first one runs out.