The Colon Club

Hello,

I'm new to the group and fresh out of my reversal surgery (11/27/17). The only LARS symptom I'm having so far is clustering/fragmentation. I started an Input/Output Data Diary that would enable me to:

- track any progress (I hope)
- forecast my day
- plan activities (tennis, workouts, sexo, etc.)

Also, if I analyze something I tend to start finding it more interesting than annoying.
Here is the Food & Output Diary sheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1aIKlJuruspvE7E-9ciaE7-NncOseH_fAbgIjj8uzyyg/edit#gid=446449640

I'm currently tracking (per day):

- Total number of outputs
- Total time span of outputs throughout the day
- Output intervals (average time between outputs)
- Output start time (from previous breakfast)

Feel free to copy/use/modify as you like.

This is a great idea. It's good to see if eating at certain times or specific foods consistently cause issues. You are on the right track to figuring out what you will need to do to gain control. It can take some time and trial and error.

Thank you very much for sharing your Food and Output diary log. It's fantastic ! I think that others will be able to build on your idea to create their own customized spreadsheets.

To understand your own situation better, I think it would help if you could create a signature so that people could see what your DX was and what kinds if treatments (e.g., LAR surgery, radiation, chemo, etc.) you had prior to your reversal. The amount of clustering is a direct result of all of these factors,
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Thanks. I'm no spreadsheet/data expert. If anyone has any improvements or new ideas I'd love to incorporate them into mine as well.

Regarding the back history for my signature. I'm going to piece that together. I wasn't very proactive in the earlier phases of my treatment. I didn't learn until later how proactive I should have been in advocating for myself. Can you tell me what all the important pieces of historic information are so that I can request everything from my oncologist/radiation oncologist/surgeon?

delemur wrote:If anyone has any improvements or new ideas I'd love to incorporate them into mine as well...
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Can you tell me what all the important pieces of historic information are so that I can request everything from my oncologist/radiation oncologist/surgeon?

I can provide a bit of information in the two areas that you mentioned above, but it may take some time for me to get all the information organized. For now, I will just summsrize briefly by saying:

• Spreadsheet ideas - I have a Food-Toilet-Exercise log that I used for the first couple of years after reversal. It had three panels. In each of the panels I had items organized by time, where each item could have several subscripts to further describe the item. For example, in the Toilet log I used the Bristol Stool Chart for describing the type of stool, but I also had other subscripts, like 'size of stool', 'color', 'level of urgency', and 'time on toilet', etc. It was the same for the other panels: Each item entered in the spreadsheet had multiple subscripts.
  
  The three panels were then interleaved and displayed on a master timeline so that I could see the overall pattern.
  
  I haven't used my spreadsheet for a couple of years now, because my situation has stabilized, and I now know all of my bowel-movement trggers by heart. .But when I was first starting out, I used the spreadsheet on a daily basis for planning purposes.
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• List of historic information - I could put together a list of items that I consider important, but it would be different from the list of items that hospitals require when patients want to request a second opinion. My list consists basically of written reports from procedures or interventions, such as: colonoscopy report (including its biopsy report), surgery report (including pathology report on the resected specimen), all CT scan/MRI scan/PET scan/ultrasound reports, including any CD-ROMs, all lab reports (especially ones that report on tumor markers), all EKG reports, etc

Your sheet definitely sounds like it has some elements that mine does not have. If you can find the time, would you mind uploading your old spreadsheet to Google and sharing it. It should convert pretty well to Google format.

I'm going through all of my paperwork right now to see if I can piece together my history and all the important details along the way.