When the Pulmonologist Asks and You Have Nothing
You sit across from the respiratory physician six weeks after the worst attack you've had in years — the one where your PEF dropped into the red zone mid-lap at the pool and you had to pull six puffs of Ventolin in forty minutes. She asks about frequency, triggers, rescue inhaler usage over the past month. You have a rough memory and a couple of pharmacy receipts. The entire consultation is built on guesswork, and the management plan she writes reflects that. Incomplete data produces incomplete care.
The problem with most asthma tracking is that it happens in retrospect. People remember the bad days because those are the ones that leave a mark. What gets missed is the yellow zone reading on a Tuesday morning, the three-puff Ventolin use before a run that wasn't counted as an attack but absolutely was a signal. Those subclinical events are where the real management intelligence lives.
The Reading Behind the Reading
The PEF - Peak Expiratory Flow field in this template uses the traffic light classification: Green (80–100% of personal best), Yellow (50–79%), Red (below 50%). This isn't decorative — it's a clinical protocol. The paired PEF l/s integer field records the raw value in litres per second, which means the zone field is for pattern recognition and the l/s field is for precision. You can run a filter on all Yellow zone readings from the past three months and plot them against the Trigger field to see whether exercise-induced bronchospasm is clustering around swimming versus running. That's a question your respiratory physician will ask and one you can now answer with data rather than impression.
The Time field — separate from the date — is not administrative overhead. Nocturnal dipping is a well-documented pattern in poorly controlled asthma: PEF readings taken at 6 AM are typically lower than readings at noon, and that variance itself is a diagnostic indicator. When you have twelve weeks of timestamped entries, your pulmonologist can look at morning-versus-evening PEF distributions and flag diurnal variability before it becomes a hospitalisation.
Rescue and preventive pharmacology are logged in separate sections. The Inhaler and Puff fields capture acute use — Ventolin puffs during or after an attack. The Preventive Inhaler and its own Puff count track the Seretide maintenance regimen independently. This split matters because rescue inhaler frequency is a proxy for control status, and conflating rescue with preventive puff counts muddies the picture. If your Ventolin count climbs while your Seretide compliance stays constant, that's a control failure signal, not a medication adherence problem.
After Sixty Days of Entries
A two-month dataset with consistent morning and evening readings changes the shape of every clinical conversation. You stop describing symptoms and start showing trends. The Trigger multichoice field — Swimming, Running, Exercise — builds a frequency table over time that identifies which activities consistently push readings into the yellow zone. If swimming is clean and running reliably drops your PEF by 20 points, the management conversation shifts from "avoid exercise" to "pre-treat with Ventolin before running but not before swimming."
The Prednisolone entries in the Pill field mark the serious interventions. Each one is timestamped and linked to the PEF readings that preceded it. Over two months, you can see exactly how many days of yellow-zone drift preceded each course of oral steroids — and whether that lag is getting shorter, which would indicate worsening baseline control.
Three entries: Neulin 125, Neulin 250, Prednisolone. The theophylline dose stepping tells its own story without any additional annotation.