Why I built Relentless

I didn’t set out to build a health app. I set out to survive a very challenging time in my life, and Relentless is what I made along the way.

It started with one routine surgery

In 2024 I had surgery on my stomach. It went great. Recovery was fine. I thought that was the end of it.

Seven weeks later, my gallbladder decided - quite suddenly - that it needed to come out, this time as an emergency. I got home and recovery was rough, because now I’d had two major abdominal surgeries close together. Then, five weeks after that, my appendix went too. Another emergency, almost no turnaround.

By the time I got home from the third one, it took me a good three or four weeks to recover from what everyone kept calling a “routine” operation. That was one of the hardest parts, honestly - having doctors and specialists tell me I’d be fine in a few days when I truly, genuinely wasn’t. I’d had three major abdominal surgeries in a matter of months. My body knew that even when the timelines on paper didn’t.

Then it kept going

Then I had complications from the appendix surgery. In the fifteen months that followed, I had three more surgeries to cut adhesions - scar tissue that kept forming and re-forming from the appendectomy.

All those abdominal surgeries left my digestive system in a mess. I had to be careful about everything I ate, take different medications to manage it, and see my GP and specialists constantly. I even had multiple blockages that had to be monitored over that time.

And it wasn’t only my body

To make things more complicated, I have bipolar disorder. It’s hard to keep stable at the best of times - never mind while you’re moving through major surgery after major surgery.

I ended up admitted to a mental health hospital for the fifth time in my life. But this was the first time it was because I had tried to take my life.

That meant starting over: revisiting and re-trialling all of my bipolar medications, and going through different treatments - two variants of TMS, and ECT. To make it even harder, ECT went wrong, and I lost my memory for several months of 2025.

The spreadsheet

Through all of this I was in and out of doctors’ offices, and one thing wore me down more than almost anything else: having to explain my entire health situation, from the beginning, every single time.

So I started a spreadsheet. I kept it up to date as things changed, and before every hospital visit or appointment I’d print out the latest version and bring it with me. It was the only way I could hold the whole picture in one place - and hand it over without having to relive it out loud each time.

Around then, a friend was going through her own difficult health journey. I mentioned that I should just turn my spreadsheet into an app. She said: yes, please - I would use it.

Building Relentless

That’s when I started building Relentless. At first it was bare bones and pretty manual, because it was only ever going to be for me and my friend.

But not long after I started, I realised this could actually help a lot of people. Anyone carrying a complicated health story, tired of being passed between specialists and pharmacies and hospitals with nobody holding the full picture.

So I decided to build it properly - and to try to get it into the hands of people who have stories like mine.

That’s what Relentless is. The tool I wished I’d had, built by someone who needed it too.