She was being treated between Delhi and San Jose. My mom, mausi (aunt), and mama (uncle) were in California, Mumbai, and Maryland. I was in college. We all loved her. We all wanted to help. But most days, none of us really knew what was happening to her.
So we did what families do. We called.
We called her to ask how she was feeling. We called my mama to ask what the new prescription said. We called my doctor aunt to ask what the report actually meant. And then we'd try to pass it on to everyone else, but a detail always slipped. We obviously didn't get the medical jargon, but we tried to give the whole picture to everyone, as much as we could.
Some reports were in emails, prescriptions were on WhatsApp, some pdfs of reports. Symptoms were discussed on WA groups.
Some things only mama remembered and if you didn't ask him on the right day, you'd never know.
Before every doctor's visit, he'd try to put her last 2-3 weeks back together. By the time she sat down in front of the doctor, the first 10 minutes always went into catching him up. Not into figuring out. Just into explaining the past.
Then came the surgery.
A part of her pancreas was removed and sent for biopsy.
That's when we found out.
She lost almost 15 kgs. Her entire appearance changed, which she obviously didn't like (she looks pretty darn cute to me). She is okay now, she loves to watch her soap operas, occasionally discusses her stock portfolio, and is still very much the heart of the family.
I am grateful every single day that this story didn't end somewhere worse.
But that moment never left us.
It stayed as guilt. As anger. As a question we couldn't stop asking: what if we'd understood the reports earlier? What if the doctor had seen the whole picture? There must have been a signal in one of the reports. What if we'd known what to ask?
Maybe something would've changed. And that "maybe" is hard to live with.
In the last 2 years, I have worked with giant hospitals, telemedicine operators & doctors to observe all this much more closely.
The scene, in every hospital, is always the same.
A son holding a thick medical folder. A daughter scrolling through her phone, looking for a PDF she made by stitching together old reports. A wife trying to remember if the small white tablet is the morning one or the evening one. Months of someone's life, squeezed into a 10 minute appointment.
We're making some of the biggest decisions of our lives with broken tools — memory, panic, phone calls, WhatsApp chats, emails, PDFs, and a hundred scattered files.
So I built something.
The whole story, in one place — so families can know, instead of guessing.
I can't undo a wrong diagnosis. No app can.
But I can help a family feel a little less alone, a little less confused, and a little less dependent on memory when it matters most.