Something I learned the slow way, and it isn’t about any one compound. If your protocol lives inside a provider portal or a telehealth chat, that portal is not your record. It’s theirs. Messages get edited, threads get archived, a dose instruction you swear you read disappears when you go back for it. I’ve watched it happen on more than one platform now, and the common thread is that the company controls the only copy. So I keep my own. Every dose change, I screenshot the message and write the date next to it in my own log. Every time a clinician tells me to adjust something, I note who said it and when. It feels excessive until the one time it isn’t. The reason I bother is the same reason I log ROM in degrees instead of writing down impressions. Memory is a terrible instrument. Three months out, you genuinely cannot reconstruct whether the nausea started before or after the titration, or what the actual instruction was, and if the only record is sitting on someone else’s server you’ve got nothing to reason from. I had bloods done in Q1 and again last month, and the only reason the comparison meant anything is that I had both panels saved with dates, not a vague sense that the numbers had moved.
What I actually keep, for anyone wanting a starting point: - Every dose and the exact date I changed it. Not “around mid-April.” The date. - Screenshots of any instruction from a clinician or pharmacy, with the sender and timestamp visible. - Lab values as numbers with reference ranges, not the portal’s red/green flag. - Side effects logged the day they happen, because retrofitting them later is just storytelling. None of this is paranoia about being wronged, though that’s part of why the screenshots matter. It’s mostly that you are running an experiment on yourself, often with overlapping variables, and you can’t separate signal from noise without a clean timeline you actually control. A provider deleting a message is the dramatic version. The quiet version is just you, six months on, unable to say what changed when. If you’re tracking anything that titrates, peptide or hormone or otherwise, assume the portal will not be there when you need it and keep the parallel copy. Costs you thirty seconds per entry and saves you the appt where you both shrug at each other.