Review 2022 family health events

By 130s - November 08, 2023

Year 2023 is fast approaching the end. But I just had a chance to review the family health issues back in 2022.

Parent's struggle with the children' health problem has been almost at the center of the blog, since this post in January 2017 where we first wrote about our first child's perpetual respiratory issue. Since then, I've been logging the health issues and events at least date and symptom even briefly in an one-liner if I didn't have time. As I wrote in May 2022 I've been slowing down my career (temporarily) so that kids can get better care even when they're sick. While it takes a little more than trivial effort to keep track of any health events, I feel knowing these is imperative because it's the time and effort I have dedicated for our kids' well-being in exchange.

Being meticulous

Anecdotally I'm always tempted to say that any one of our kids has always been sick (so I need to take time off from work, otherwise who takes care of them?), but is that really so? I want to have more accurate understanding on how often our kids get sick / how often I've been sidelined from work or whatever I could be indulging.

Here's how I logged health events:

Any event that got me (or my wife) worried and prepare for the worse. A typical example is frequent coughing at night, with which parents not just give treatment at night, we also coordinate the next day in case the child has to stay home.
One event per child. Sometimes multiple kids show the same symptom (e.g. coughs / they both get covid at the same time etc.) Count each case individually.
Caveat of the way I did in 2022: It doesn't cover the days in the middle in the continuous days of sickness. This is because I didn't necessarily record the end of the event.

2022 family health impression

Before looking into the actual data, I have this impersonated view about the last year's family health (albeit it's been already 11 months into 2023):

2022 might have been the year that was the most manifested with family members' sick events.
Our then 3 turned to 4-yr old AK kept getting sick, or kept coughing throughout the year.
Our then infant turned to 1-yr old LM got sick frequently in spring.
Winter-spring i.e Jan thru April was horrible.
Both bos were terribly sick in June-July while we were in Japan (although they enjoyed the stay).

Result

139 health events were logged in 2022.

This does NOT mean someone was sick on 139 days in 2022. There can be overlapping days where multiple kids were logged as sick.

More than 10 events were seen in a single month on 7 months.
Indeed 5-yr old AK were the sickest.
Huge spike in July was potentially environmental (international trip, staying in old home)?
Number of cases is low but almost every month I had something happening.

Any takeaways?

I kind of feel reassured in the sense that my impression seems to hold for most aspects.
The look of AK from 2022 may be concerning (surely it did to us) but in 2023 we saw an unexpected, but drastic improvement. We'll follow up on that.
Other than that, not really practical lessons I can find... Hard to recognize if there's any patterns.
Maybe keep doing for another years that could reveal something?
Maybe sort per the type of sickness e.g. respiratory / abdominal / nasal etc. to see more patterns.
We're glad all kids are growing.