Visualizing Sick Days

Zach Rottman dealt with the stress of his son bringing home “bugs” from daycare by creating a table on how often the individuals of the household were sick. There are a bunch of advantages you can get from tracking “quantified self” data with visualizations, and I can appreciate this one about kids bringing home sickness from school. Not the kind of homework parents want to be dealing with.

My boy started school, my boy got sick.

As any parent could have told me, we got clobbered. Within three days, my son had Covid, and while he was only mildly sick for a day or two, he (and I) stayed home for ten. Meanwhile, my partner was out of commission for longer than that. Scarcely a week after his return our son brought home some gnarly cold—home again, not sleeping, not eating. Turns out, it’s especially hard to manage a head cold when you don’t know how to blow your nose yet and have a strong and very vocal preference against medicine. The next time it was hand, foot, and mouth disease, then RSV, followed by a slew of mysterious rashes. You get the idea. Most of the time mommy and daddy didn’t fare much better.

So, to distract me from my misery and take on a project that could plausibly be brought to fruition while also tending to a sick one-year-old, I started quantifying the sick days and built a simple web app (myboyissick.com) to see it all.

I do think the rows of 12 squares aren’t easily translatable to days or weeks on the calendar. Not a big deal when you’re designing just for yourself, but I would layout the grid to be more relatable to a calendar format.

Article found on Nightingale.