The tools I actually use

Gemini Gem · Daily

1. The Chemo Tracker Gem

I've tracked the ups and downs of chemo with AI for a long time. Every day I tell it how I'm doing: energy, mood, sickness, skin, bowels, food, sleep, whatever's going on.

The biggest change I've made: I've stopped scoring myself out of ten.

When you rate your own mood and energy every day, you get stuck in a narrow band of numbers. You never drop to a one. You never hit a ten. Everything ends up a five, six or seven, and the change you're trying to track disappears.

So I've set the Gem up to listen to what I say, in my own words, and make its own call on how I'm doing. It won't always be bang on. But it's consistent, which makes it the most honest way I've found of seeing change over months rather than days.

I also use it to keep an eye on my diet, and to get through some of the grimmer side effects.

Built from my data

2. My two-week cycle plan

Once I had the first two cycles tracked, I used that data to build a day-by-day plan for a two-week chemo cycle: what's likely to hit when, and what helps.

It means day 3 isn't a surprise anymore. I know it's coming, and I know what to do about it.

Mine maps all fourteen days: energy out of ten, what movement is realistic, how much work I can do, when to rest, what to eat, and which medicines step up when. Day 1 infusion. The fatigue wall on day 4. The nadir on day 5. The rebound from day 8, when I go back to the gym and do my best thinking. Then pre-infusion, and round again.

How the tracking becomes the map

This is the bit people ask about, so here's the actual process. It takes me about twenty minutes at the end of a cycle.

1. Two weeks of rough notes. Every day I tell the Gem how I'm doing, out loud, in my own words. No form, no scoring. It logs energy, sleep, bowels, rash, mood, what I ate, what I managed to do.
2. Lay the last cycle next to the plan. At the end of the fortnight I ask one question: where did the plan say one thing and my body do another? Not "how was it" — specifically where the prediction broke.
3. Find what actually repeats. Two cycles is a coincidence. Three or four is a pattern. The nadir landing on days 4 and 5, the fog breaking on day 8, the rash peaking around day 10 — those held often enough to plan around. Plenty of other things didn't, and got dropped.
4. Change one thing at a time. Each cycle carries one or two deliberate changes, written down before it starts so I can't rewrite the story afterwards. This cycle: no pre-infusion fast, and I'm trialling the take-home steroid in the mornings.
5. Write the next fourteen days. Energy forecast, what movement is realistic, how many hours of work and for which business, when to rest, what to eat, which medicines step up when. Then the two boxes that matter most: what to have in the house before Wednesday, and what to raise with my team.
6. Carry the failures forward. Metformin has now failed twice because I keep starting it at the nadir, when my gut is at its worst. That's on this cycle's map as an open question: start it on day 8 instead, when things are calm.

The useful part isn't the prediction. It's that a bad day becomes an expected day. Day 5 flat on my back isn't a sign of decline, it's day 5 doing what day 5 does — and on day 8 I'll be in the gym. Knowing that is the difference between managing treatment and being managed by it.

It also makes me a better patient to treat. When I say the gut trouble lands on days 4 and 5 every time, that's fourteen cycles of logged data talking, not a guess made in a ten-minute appointment.

A caution worth stating plainly: this is a plan, not a prediction, and it's mine. The doses, timings and medicines are set with my own team for my own treatment. Build your own from your own data and your own clinicians — don't run mine.

I rebuild it every cycle, at the same time as my bloods, because it changes as treatment does.

Google Doc + NotebookLM · Long term

3. The Master Chemo Tracker and my Cancer Vault

You can't rely on a chat tool like a Gem to hold months of information. So once a week I copy everything from the Gem into a Google Doc called Master Chemo Tracker. It's fixed, I know where it is, and it's not going anywhere.

That doc is plugged into a NotebookLM notebook I call my Cancer Vault. Alongside the tracker it holds all my blood results, scan reports and clinic letters, going back as far as I can get them, plus other data I've gathered over the years, like the genetics work I did with Astron Health.

One rule: hard data only. Nothing that isn't scientifically backed. No opinions. Only facts that help someone understand my cancer and how I'm dealing with it.

It's incredibly useful for asking questions about my own history, and it's where the information for my card starts.

A warning, from experience: check the numbers against the original documents. When I asked NotebookLM for a full table of my bloods, it missed about half the values. It's brilliant for finding things. It's not a replacement for the report.

Gemini Gems · On demand

4. Advisor Gems

Over the years I've seen professionals outside my hospital team who've helped with my protocol, off-label drugs, supplements and my head.

I went back through everything I had from them and built a Gem for each one:

• An integrative nutritionist
• An integrative oncologist
• My talk therapy counsellor

Each Gem holds my records of our conversations and the documents they sent me. I ask it to answer the way that person would. Then I can go back and ask what they told me before, or what they'd be likely to suggest now.

You can load in huge amounts of attachments. And if it saves a £250 to £500 session just to be reminded of something they've already told me, I figure it's worth a go.

It's a memory of their advice, not the person. Anything that would change my treatment still goes to the actual professional and to my oncology team.