Keeping track of your medical history can be quite a task, not to mention making sure that all of your physicians are kept in the loop. Thank god for the My Medical app (available via multiple platforms), which is only about five dollars to download, and may well be the best money you will ever spend.  This handy tool allows you to store medical information for multiple people, each with their own individual profile.  It will prompt you to enter everything from basic general information and emergency contacts to current and past medications, tests, procedures, surgeries, allergies, diagnoses, immunizations, hospitalizations, complete physician information, family history, health insurance….the list goes on and on.  You can add notes for certain hospital stays (mine typically reflect which medication combinations tended to clear my obstructions most quickly) AND, best of all, you can wirelessly print the entire document or email it at the touch of a button.  Being that we are rather frequent flyers at the local ER, I have three copies printed up at all times (one in my car, one in my husband’s car and one in the office at home), so upon arrival to the ER, we simply hand my “owner’s manual”, as my husband likes to call it, to the nurse and he or she instantly has all the information she needs.  At doctor appointments with new physicians, I simply ask them for their office email and my entire record system is automatically transferred within a minute.  It is a beautiful thing.  It also comes in quite handy when I am gorked beyond belief on pain medicine and a question arises about a surgery or medication.  My husband can simply refer the person making the inquiry to the app instead of my incoherent ass.  Magical.

For things like my bookshelf full of surgical records and the like, I took all of them and scanned them to myself at home, saving a master copy on a zip drive and several duplicate copies on thumb drives that I can send out when requested by a physician. I will admit that the process took about a week to do, but once it was done things were so much easier.  As sad as it is to admit, the files were far too big to email, so this is a quick and efficient way to get the info sent out in a timely manner.

If you are in the hospital with any frequency or have multiple conditions and doctors, please take the time to download the app and enter in all your info.  It will make life so much easier in the long run!