The Number Nobody Asks You
When you have a condition like NF2 — Neurofibromatosis Type 2, which causes bilateral acoustic neuromas and a cascade of central nervous system tumors over the course of a lifetime — you will have many surgeries. The medical system keeps its version of that record. The surgeon has operative notes. The hospital has discharge summaries. Your GP has referral letters. None of these people can give you your surgery count on demand, tell you whether your hearing was better or worse after your second craniotomy than your first, or explain why you chose one neurosurgeon over another in 2018.
You are the only person who has been at every procedure. This template is the record only you can keep.
The Patient-Side Outcome Is the Only Outcome That Matters Here
Pros and Cons are the two fields that distinguish this from a medical record. These are not clinical outcome measures. They're the patient's own assessment: what actually changed, what got worse, what wasn't worth it, what turned out to be exactly right.
After a stereotactic radiosurgery session for a spinal tumor: Pros — "pain reduced by about 60% within three months, able to walk without the cane for six months." Cons — "extreme fatigue for eight weeks, couldn't drive, lost a consulting contract." That is information that does not exist in any medical record. It is the lived cost-benefit calculation of a specific procedure at a specific point in the disease trajectory.
Over time, the Pros and Cons fields across twenty procedures build a personal evidence base. When a new neurosurgeon recommends a procedure you've had a variant of before, you have your own data. Not statistics. Your history.
Surgeon and Location as the Long-Term Relationship Map
Doctor(s) is plural in intent — for complex cranial procedures, you may have a neurosurgeon, a neuro-otologist, a cerebrovascular surgeon, and an anesthesiologist. Getting all names into one field is messier than a structured approach but it's complete. Location records the hospital or surgical center — which matters when you're evaluating whether outcomes correlate with institution as much as with procedure type.
Hospital Stay records the recovery length: "3 nights," "12 days, 4 in ICU," "outpatient, home same day." For a condition involving repeated neurosurgery, recovery duration is itself a data point. A procedure that requires 12 days inpatient followed by 6 weeks unable to work carries a total life cost far beyond its clinical risk profile.
Type is the free-text procedure description: "right posterior fossa craniotomy for acoustic neuroma debulking," "gamma knife radiosurgery L2-L4 spinal tumors," "lumbar drain placement." Free text because the procedures are too varied and too condition-specific to fit a dropdown. NF2 patients have surgery types that most people encounter once in a lifetime, if at all. The field just captures what happened.
Notes holds everything else: who referred you, what the outcome discussion was, what you decided not to do and why, the post-operative complication that didn't make it into the formal report. The follow-up appointment where the surgeon said the residual tumor was stable. The conversation about hearing preservation versus total removal. The record is yours.