Tuesday, August 02, 2005

Having the internet doesn't make me an MD...

You know how you can have a red spot on your eye and you look it up on some internet medical site and you figure out that you have Ebola and 20 minutes to live? Well, that's sort of what happened with my mom. We had done all of this internet research and figured out that she had Fibromyalgia and resigned ourselves to the fact that it was kind of awful and incurable but she wouldn't die. Then her HMO doctor said that she thought that she had Fibromyalgia (she probably got it from the same website we did) and sent her to a specialist. It turns out that she has a pinched nerve in her back and an old injury in her leg that never healed properly. Some sleeping pills and physical therapy and she's supposed to be all better. Stupid internet.

Stupid HMO, too, because she told them right off like a year ago that she had injured her leg at work. Of course, to be fair, they told her to go to physical therapy back then and she wanted to see if it would heal itself. So I guess that was more her fault than theirs.

Anyway, yay for something not too bad! Hopefully, she can get better before our vacation in October.

1 comment:

SC874 said...

I did this once too and convinced myself I had ovarian cancer. I went to the doctor and he laughed at me. Turns out I was just a little bloated. So yeah - don't diagnose yourself over the internet!