I did not start with a plan. I started with a note in my phone that said: woke up again, soaked, furious. That was the level of sophistication I brought to the first appointment.

Of 35 women in this cohort, 50% mentioned sleep. This figure comes from approved logs in the current Narrated corpus, including seed corpus entries during launch density.

Six months later, the biggest difference is not that everything is solved. It is that I can see the shape of what changed. The first few weeks were quieter but not miraculous. By week six, I had fewer 3 a.m. wakeups. By month three, I could tell the difference between a bad night and a pattern returning.

* * *

The patch became part of the story, but so did the tracking. I wish I had brought dates earlier. I wish I had written down the hot flashes separately from the anxiety. I wish I had known that a doctor can do more with a timeline than with a general plea of 'I feel unlike myself.'

What helped me was turning the experience into something I could point to. Not a perfect chart. Just enough truth to stop starting from scratch every time.