Brianna & Xander
Active member
5/14/25
I just want to say an incredibly heartfelt "Thank you" to everyone for their thoughtful, compassionate messages yesterday. I didn't see most of them until fairly late (no notifications for some reason) so I apologize for the delayed responses. I can't tell you how much I appreciate you all. I was obviously feeling really low (as has happened several times in this rollercoaster) and your messages were so helpful.
Yesterday my partner WFH purposely so be with me, and they took over after his AM dose to give him his early-cycle snacks so I could sleep for a few hours without worrying about Xander. First few hour period since December that I haven't been on-call! He was bouncing, so there was nothing to worry about anyway, but still.
I'm going through my spreadsheet and editing the Remarks column for every day to transition the notes to a shorthand as Wendy requested. I've added a key for my abbreviations at the top of the column. I don't want to cut out too much. In my edit view, all of the cells are constrained to 45 x 45px squares; the cell doesn't expand unless you click it to see the rest of the text. For whatever annoying reason, the "publish to web" version completely ignores that formatting and overflows anyway, hence the elongated cells. So I'm going through the old stuff and editing all of the text to work better, but it's very time-consuming, so please excuse the mess in the meantime.
Relatedly, as I mentioned in a comment yesterday, I'm very data-driven and like to keep track of every detail I can. The shared spreadsheet is incredibly minimal in comparison to my private spreadsheet. I said someday I'd take screenshots to show how much I keep track of aside from the BG tab, so I did that. If anyone's curious, I linked pictures for some tabs and even dropdown options below (to avoid wasting forum space). Please feel free to skip these if it's not interesting to you!
I just want to say an incredibly heartfelt "Thank you" to everyone for their thoughtful, compassionate messages yesterday. I didn't see most of them until fairly late (no notifications for some reason) so I apologize for the delayed responses. I can't tell you how much I appreciate you all. I was obviously feeling really low (as has happened several times in this rollercoaster) and your messages were so helpful.
Yesterday my partner WFH purposely so be with me, and they took over after his AM dose to give him his early-cycle snacks so I could sleep for a few hours without worrying about Xander. First few hour period since December that I haven't been on-call! He was bouncing, so there was nothing to worry about anyway, but still.
I'm going through my spreadsheet and editing the Remarks column for every day to transition the notes to a shorthand as Wendy requested. I've added a key for my abbreviations at the top of the column. I don't want to cut out too much. In my edit view, all of the cells are constrained to 45 x 45px squares; the cell doesn't expand unless you click it to see the rest of the text. For whatever annoying reason, the "publish to web" version completely ignores that formatting and overflows anyway, hence the elongated cells. So I'm going through the old stuff and editing all of the text to work better, but it's very time-consuming, so please excuse the mess in the meantime.
Relatedly, as I mentioned in a comment yesterday, I'm very data-driven and like to keep track of every detail I can. The shared spreadsheet is incredibly minimal in comparison to my private spreadsheet. I said someday I'd take screenshots to show how much I keep track of aside from the BG tab, so I did that. If anyone's curious, I linked pictures for some tabs and even dropdown options below (to avoid wasting forum space). Please feel free to skip these if it's not interesting to you!
- Food Tab - Includes amounts given, eaten right away, grazed on, and when he finished if he grazed. Many cells are dropdowns with pre-filled options for convenience, since I got tired of writing this all manually. Food brand dropdown, flavor dropdown, appetite level dropdown, medications mixed in dropdown, etc).
- Insulin Tab - Keeps track of dosage, injection location, supplies, reactions, etc. Lots of dropdowns here too: one for his reaction to being grabbed, one for his reaction to the injection itself, one for misc notes, etc. Not visible, but it also calculates a success rate (less needed now that I rarely have furshots
). - Behavior Tab - Keeps track of how he's behaving over time. Lots of options in these dropdowns: first half of the list, and the second half of the list.
- Wellness Tab - Keeps track of nausea, vomiting, hairballs, ketones, etc, in a dropdown of course.
- Water/Urine Tab - Keeps track of water intake and urine output.
- At the end of each line on every tab, there's a summary cell. So for example: for one meal, I'll use the dropdowns and enter all typed info, and then in that last cell I'll write out the summary. That then gets copied and pasted into the Remarks column on the BG Tab. Since I don't want my own spreadsheet to be in shorthand, I'm now writing two summaries: the private one and the public one that you all see.
- I also have a bunch of hidden reference sheets, such as one that keeps track of the calorie content of each food (so that his Food Tab will automatically calculate calorie intake), one that keeps track of the other nutritional aspects of his food, one that tracks his opinion on each food, etc. I can't tell you how many hundreds of hours I've sunk into creating these really complex spreadsheets with hidden cells and calculations to get all the info I want.
Last edited:
That's why I wanted to share screenshots; I felt like I wasn't able to really express how intensive they were, lol. The dropdowns are really nice when you're sick of writing the same things over and over! So much quicker. I've also really enjoyed using the "Table" feature instead of just plain spreadsheet cells; it looks neater and more put together to me.
(sympathy pains).
Trust me, spending hundreds of hours on this crap made me perfect everything that I could!