Kairix

What created it

Forty-seven years

I’ve had migraines since I was eight years old. I’m 55 now, and the attacks come every day.

For more than 30 years I worked as a contract technical writer in IT. I moved from company to company, dozens of them, and each one handed me a new product and new people to help.

My job was to stand between the people who built the software and the people who had to use it. I learned what customers really need, where they get stuck, and what makes them give up. Then I wrote the guides that got them up and running fast.

Migraine took that career from me, one lost day at a time.

What people don’t see is the second job that comes with chronic illness. I manage preventives and rescue medicines, refills and treatments. I keep track of appointments with neurologists and specialists. And I track every attack, because my doctors need it, and so does Social Security.

I tried the apps. One reminded me to take my medicines. Another logged my migraines and rescue medicines. My appointments lived in a calendar, and everything else lived in notes and in my head.

None of them talked to each other, and none of them saw the whole picture. Tracking attacks and rescue medicines is a start. But life with chronic migraine is preventives, treatments, side effects, refills, appointments and paperwork, all at once.

Then comes the hardest part: telling it. In an exam room, I had minutes to explain months. My neurologist needed to know what had changed. Social Security wanted dates, frequency and proof. The lawyers meant to help me needed records I had to rebuild from memory, often on bad days, in pain.

There’s something harder to admit. For years, I told myself it wasn’t that bad. A rough week. A bad month. It would pass.

When I finally put the days side by side, the numbers said what I wouldn’t. This wasn’t a bad stretch. It was chronic, and it was my life. Seeing it clearly hurt, but it was the first step to managing it honestly.

And through all of it, one question never got a clear answer: is it working? Every new preventive and every treatment comes with hope. Months later, I still couldn’t say for sure whether it had helped, or by how much. When you hurt every day, memory can’t be the judge.

Easier is Kairix

That’s why I created Kairix. I needed one tool to help me with everything, because life is tiring. Chronic pain is tiring. Tracking it all is exhausting.

Doing all of it while in pain is like keeping a ship’s log in the middle of a storm while bailing water. The record matters. But the storm doesn’t wait, and some days you can’t even hold the pen.

I needed to make it all easier. Easier is Kairix. And here’s why.

You already know what to do next

Thirty years of writing manuals taught me something surprising: the best tools hardly need one. Today’s best apps run on intuition. You open them and you already know what to do next.

That’s how I built Kairix. Each step asks one thing at a time. The button you need is where you’d reach for it. The words are short and plain, the kind you can read with one eye open during an attack.

When you do want help, it’s there in a few short steps, written the way I wrote for a living: plain, quick and to the point.

Is it working?

The heart of Kairix is the question that drives life with chronic migraine: is this treatment working? Kairix is built to answer it automatically and honestly. Then it hands that answer to the three who decide my care: my neurologist, my insurer and Social Security.

Every other migraine app helps you record your migraines. None of them turns that record into results: the right treatment chosen, covered, kept, and believed. Here’s why that matters so much.

Treatment is trial and error. People with chronic migraine try preventive after preventive, often for years. A fair trial takes about three months, and each one costs time, money and hope. When you hurt every day, “I think it’s a little better” is all memory gives you. “26 headache days a month before, 17 now” is what changes a decision.

Insurance is where care gets lost. In a 2021 survey by the Coalition for Headache and Migraine Patients, 87% of people had faced prior authorization, and 68% had been denied coverage. Most respondents had frequent headaches, so this is people like me. The rules insurers apply are numbers:

Doctors are buried too. The American Headache Society calls prior authorization a cause of clinician burnout. One practice estimated each request costs about $100 in staff time. The Society’s advice is to document every medicine tried, by class, with dose and how long. That’s exactly the history patients struggle to rebuild.

Social Security needs the same proof. Under its guidance for headache disorders (SSR 19-4p), Social Security looks at how often attacks happen despite treatment, how you respond, and whether you follow your treatment. Headache diaries are among the first records it uses, because memory and estimates aren’t enough.

Three audiences, the same questions. How often? How bad? What have you tried? Is it working? Kairix keeps one honest record that answers all of them.

What Kairix does about it

Kairix already keeps the pieces that other apps scatter. They live in one place, on my phone, encrypted, with no account:

Now those pieces add up to the answer. In Is it working?, a card for each treatment shows the numbers before and after:

Ajovy · started July 3 · monthly

An example, not real data.

Kairix knows when each trial reaches its usual review point. That’s about three months for pills and CGRP drugs, and two cycles, about six months, for Botox. It says when the look is ready, and which appointment to bring it to.

It keeps every medicine I’ve tried, grouped by class, with the dose, how long, and why it stopped. That’s the history the American Headache Society tells doctors to keep for prior authorizations.

From that one record come the pages I need: one for my doctor before each visit, and one for my disability claim. One for my insurer is next. No more rebuilding my history from memory.

The input stays tiny. A five-second check-in each evening asks: headache today, how bad, how many hours, did it stop you? Much of it is already filled in from what Kairix knows. Days I don’t log show as “no record,” never as “no headache.”

And it stays honest. Kairix reports facts: counts before and after. Decisions stay with me and my doctor.

Why it’s worth it

Tracking stops being a chore when it pays you back. Every check-in feeds the record that keeps a treatment covered, moves a claim forward, and shows my doctor what changed.

It also keeps me honest with myself. The numbers don’t let me pretend it’s just a bad week, and they don’t let me miss a real improvement either.

I built Kairix for me first, on the days I could, between the attacks. I hope it makes things a little easier for you too.

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