Googling Medical Symptoms

Like anything else that has been mentioned on the internet, Googling your symptoms has also been made fun of, to the extent where I believe the jokes so much that when I Googled my symptoms just before, I trusted all results that came up.

In fact, what started as a strange stabbing pain in my lower right abdomen turned into something wicked, like a washing machine cleaning knives the longer I was exposed to Google search results. My heart skipped beats unnaturally and I began to think something dire was happening to my body. Seven days my eyes read, and then it changed to seven minutes which then switched to seven seconds and it just kept intensifying as I opened and closed and searched through varied medical websites.

Honestly, I began to adopt the symptoms I read about. I had none of them before – I was not vomiting, nor was I nauseas, but when I read that I may have appendicitis my pain escalated and I immediately felt sick. My body led me to believe that Google was right, that I probably have less than seven seconds before something inside of me ruptured, before my insides turned out or before parts of me imploded.

Google may have its benefits when it comes to researching or pretending to research or looking up disgusting things when you are meant to be researching or procrastinating instead of researching altogether, but when it comes to medical uses it can be frightening. My grandpa is a medical freak. Seriously, if there is something wrong with you he will dance on your grave because he loves solving medical problems and talking about them for hours. He will even put your phone number on speed-dial for all eternity even after you recover from whatever it is that you had. Recently, he has been asking me and my sister to Google things like ‘jaundice’ or ‘fatty liver’ or ‘gastro’ or any other possible thing he may be affected with due to his paranoia.

We of course pretend the internet is down or just carry on doing whatever it is that we were doing and ignore his requests, in which case he would interrogate my mother who in turn interrogates him whenever she is feeling medically paranoid. I wonder, though, what it would be like if my grandpa was technologically literate. If like me, he were a digital native. I think he would have more episodes of freaking out like the one I went through before, on a secondly basis. He already does that when he does not feel like conversing about horses and betting and gambling and how men that gamble are better for me than men who smoke, however he will abandon all talk of this nonsense to speak of medical terms.

I know better than to not Google things like this but I cannot help it, especially when my mother gives me a look of concern as though her face is giving me Google results. It is then that I panic even more and panic even more after that when I find more results. The worst thing is being redirected off a medical webpage to the symptoms page, which takes a little more than expected to load. That waiting time ups my adrenalin and I feel even sicker than I am. It all just contributes negatively.

I had one worrying instance when I was at the doctor’s clinic, a female doctor who I had not yet seen before, and as I was telling her my symptoms she began typing them into the Google search engine. I looked at her in awe. How dare she try to manipulate me into thinking that I have some sort of weird disease forming in some part of my body which will kill me in seven seconds? That is my job when I Google things at home, not hers. Her job is to Google things inside her mind which has housed several medical incidents. Apparently not, in this case.

I know better than to trust Google. Googling medical symptoms is like referring to Wikipedia searches in academic writing. It cannot work, and if you do it, it will ruin your life. Well, thinking back on the episode on the toilet that I had before, my life was almost ruined. I thought it was the end of my journey. I sat there on the toilet contemplating who to say goodbye to, and almost dialing Nurse-On-Call, a helpful Australian initiative which works to rewind Google symptom results that all  inhabitants of the world Down Under stumble upon.

So it turns out that, after remembering what I did last week, I had torn a muscle because I decided to be macho woman and carry a heavy box of brand new pots on my right shoulder whilst carrying a heavy bag of cups on my left side. That whipped me right out of alignment and tore a muscle. Well, at least I think so. It makes more sense than what Google told me anyway. And I still have at least seven years in me.