Fifteen Minutes
That's what you get.
Fifteen minutes to explain months—sometimes years—of confusing, painful, life-altering experiences to a provider who's meeting you for the first time.
Fifteen minutes to cover your symptom history, your medication trials, your theories about triggers, your questions about treatment options, and whatever new thing happened since your last visit.
Fifteen minutes before they have to move to the next patient.
I've left so many appointments feeling like I barely scratched the surface. Like I forgot to mention the most important thing. Like I wasted precious time fumbling through my phone trying to find that one note I wrote at 3am.
The math doesn't work. We're trying to compress too much into too little time.
Unless we change how we show up.
Before: The Appointment Panic
Let me paint you a picture of my old appointment preparation process:
The night before, I'd frantically scroll through my symptom tracking app trying to remember what happened over the last month. I'd jot down random notes on my phone. I'd make a mental list of questions (which I'd forget the moment I walked into the exam room).
The morning of, I'd realize my notes were scattered across three different apps and a paper journal. I'd try to compile them into something coherent while simultaneously getting ready and managing my anxiety about the appointment itself.
In the waiting room, I'd scribble a few more things down. Half-formed thoughts. Fragments of memories.
And then I'd get called back, the doctor would ask "So what's been going on?" and my brain would go completely blank.
Every. Single. Time.
I'd leave with a vague sense that I'd failed to communicate something important. That if I could have just explained it better, shown them the full picture, maybe they would have taken me more seriously.
Maybe they would have actually helped.
The Document That Changed Everything
June 2, 2025. The appointment I'd waited four months for.
This time, I did something different. Instead of scrambling the night before, I spent weeks preparing. I pulled together every piece of data I had—bladder logs, pain notes, medication records, sleep patterns, stress observations.
And I organized it. I analyzed it. I turned it into a coherent story.
Six pages. Comprehensive. Professional. Clear.
When I walked into that appointment, I didn't fumble. I handed her the document and said: "Here's everything that's been happening. The patterns I've identified are on page three."
She looked at it. Actually looked at it. Read through the data, reviewed the patterns, saw the full picture of what my body had been doing for months.
And then she said the words I'd been waiting years to hear:
"This is exactly what I needed. Let's talk about treatment options."
That document—that organized, evidence-based, professional summary of my experiences—got me taken seriously. It got me surgery scheduled. It got me care.
But it took me weeks to create. It nearly broke me to compile.
There had to be a better way.
What Penny's Reports Actually Do
Reports are where all your tracking comes together into something you can actually use.
Five Report Types
Penny generates professional, text-based reports that combine your data into clear summaries:
- Bathroom Report: Frequency, urgency distribution, day/night patterns, discomfort trends
- Wellness Report: Physical, emotional, energy, and stress levels over time. Sleep and pacing patterns.
- Episodes Report: Complete summaries of your documented difficult days—triggers, duration, what helped
- Complete Report: Everything combined. The full picture.
- Appointment Report: Curated for provider visits—your questions, experiences to discuss, relevant stats
You Control What's Included
Every report is customizable. You choose the date range—last two weeks, last month, last 90 days. You choose what sections to include. You preview it before generating.
The result is a clean, professional PDF that includes all the proper disclaimers so your provider knows this is your documented observations, not clinical data.
This is the 6-page document I built by hand—except now it takes minutes instead of weeks.
The Appointments Hub: Closing the Loop
Reports are powerful. But they're only part of the story.
Because appointments aren't just about showing up with data. They're about preparing beforehand, capturing what happens during, and remembering what was said after.
That's what the Appointments Hub does.
Before Your Visit
When you add an upcoming appointment—say, your urologist follow-up next Tuesday—Penny helps you prepare:
- Any notes you've tagged as "Question for Provider" automatically appear
- Experiences you want to discuss are collected in one place
- You configure your report—what date range, what sections to include
- You generate and preview it before you walk in
No more frantic night-before scrambling. No more "I forgot to mention" regret. Your preparation is built into the workflow.
After Your Visit
This is the part everyone forgets about—including me, for years.
You walk out of an appointment with your head spinning. They said a lot of things. They recommended something. They mentioned a medication or a procedure or a referral. And by the time you get to your car, half of it is already fuzzy.
Penny's post-visit capture fixes this:
- What did they say? Capture the diagnosis, the observations, the recommendations—before you forget
- What are your next steps? New medication? Follow-up in 6 weeks? Referral to another specialist?
- How did you feel about it? Were you heard? Dismissed? Hopeful? Frustrated? This matters too.
All of this gets saved. So when your next appointment comes around—whether with the same provider or a new one—you have a complete record of where you've been.
What This Actually Looks Like
Let me walk you through a real scenario.
You have a specialist appointment in two weeks. You've been tracking with Penny for the last month—bathroom events, wellness check-ins, a couple of Episodes when things got rough.
A few days before your appointment:
- You open the Appointments Hub and see your upcoming visit
- You review the questions you've tagged throughout the month ("Ask about medication timing," "Mention the new pain location")
- You generate your report—last 30 days, complete summary, including Episode details
- You preview it and feel actually prepared
Day of your appointment:
- You walk in calm instead of frantic
- You hand them the report or pull it up on your phone
- You actually get through your questions because you have them written down
After your appointment:
- Before you even leave the parking lot, you capture what they said
- You note your next steps
- You mark how you felt about the visit
That's a completely different experience than the appointment panic I used to live in.
The Full Circle
I started this series by talking about the war nobody could see. The years of suffering in silence. The appointments where I couldn't explain what was happening to my own body.
And then I told you about the tools I built to fight back:
- A bathroom diary that actually works in brain fog
- Wellness check-ins that capture the context around your symptoms
- Episodes that document complete stories of difficult days
- Reports and appointments that bring it all together for the conversations that matter
This is Penny. This is what I needed when I was fighting alone. This is what I built so you don't have to.
You deserve to walk into appointments armed with evidence. You deserve to be heard.
That's what we're building here.