Record keeping is a good idea for any medical thing.

Quite a lot of serious medical things start out seeming not serious, including a lot of cancers. Basically once an ailment seems unusual, like “hmm this is not going away like usual,” start writing down every time, date, and detail you can remember back to when it started. Then keep that current.

Doing this will help the accuracy of your treatment.

There are also a bunch of implicit “timers” in standards of care, like take OTC drugs and rest for a week, then come back if it is still not resolved. Having a detailed precise timeline documented can help skip through those. The doctor may be able to look at the detail and say “ok you’ve already tried the easy fixes, let’s dig deeper.”