I built the tool I needed in the middle of my own treatment.

When I was diagnosed with breast cancer, nobody warned me about the paperwork of it all. There was the treatment itself — and then there was everything around it. Labwork with numbers I didn't understand yet. Appointments with three different offices in the same week. Chemo side effects that came in waves and that I could never describe accurately once I was finally sitting in front of my doctor.

I was trying to remember when I took which medication, which symptom started on which day, what the nurse said to watch for, and what I meant to ask at the next visit. I wrote things on the back of appointment cards. I texted myself in the middle of the night. And still, in the exam room, my mind would go blank.

On the hardest days of my life, I was being asked to be my own record keeper. That didn't feel fair — and it didn't have to be that way.

So I started organizing it: one place for appointments, one place for side effects, one place for medications and lab results, and a running list of questions I could add to the moment they crossed my mind. It changed how my appointments went. I stopped leaving the office wishing I had said something.

That's what became Health Companion. What began as a breast cancer journal grew into a small collection of companions — for heart failure and diabetes too — because the same problem shows up in every long, complicated diagnosis. This isn't a technology company guessing at what patients need. It's a patient building what she wished she'd had.