Your "Baseline" or Median Rectal Temp?

When I was 22 and recovering from pneumonia a home health nurse took my temperature rectally over a period of several days while I was still hooked to O2. She and my husband kept a log and there was a line for "baseline" temperature and she wrote 99.2. Through the years when I felt I might have a fever but didn't reading was right around 99 to 99.4. Orally it's .8 to 1 degree lower. Maybe this would also be called a median temp. Thoughts?

Repeated readings taken the same way (rectally, of course) at the same time of day when you are in your normal state of health should yield, when averaged, a "baseline" body temperature. Median temperature would just be a slightly different statistical parameter -- that temperature which has half the readings higher and half lower. That is...the middle value. A median value tends to give a slightly more accurate reflection of a sample of numbers IF there are extreme outliers. So if you took your morning temp every day for a month and all were, say, between 97 and 99 except for one value of 100, that high value would pull up the average but hardly effect the median. Maybe more than you wanted to know. Oral is always half to one degree lower than "core" or rectal temp.

To get an accurate reflection of your personal "baseline" temp it would be important to always check at the same time of day since body temperature is lowest in the early morning and goes up (by half to one degree) late in the afternoon. And of course if you were ill, those readings wouldn't count in a baseline reading. Hope that answered your question.

I am not sure of my baseline temperature. How would I find out?

Take it many times over the course of several days. You should see a pattern of highs and lows during different times of the day.