so i finally sat down with the spreadsheet instead of just scrolling it. five months of flares vs whatever i wrote down as the trigger that day. turns out same-day tracking was basically useless. i’d write “pain 7, no idea why” more than half the time bc i was only looking at that morning or the day before. imo once i started cross-referencing two and three days back, some of the “random” flares stopped being random.
wednesday’s crash lined up with sunday’s grocery run and a bad sleep night monday, not anything from tuesday. problem is i can’t tell if that’s a real pattern or if i’m just pattern-matching bc i want an answer. n=5 months of one person isn’t much. and some flares still show up with nothing in the three days prior, which either means the window is even longer than 72 hours or there just isn’t always a trigger and i need to accept that. pain clinic appt is still two months out so i’ve got time to keep logging, i just don’t know what i’m supposed to be logging FOR at this point. more days doesn’t necessarily mean more clarity. for anyone who’s been doing this longer than me, did the pattern ever get less muddy, or does it just stay probabilistic forever?