Dr. Google

So I’ve been very good about keeping up with what we are doing lately, but I’m feeling a bit of philosophical meandering coming on. Probably because it’s January, and well we have a lot of snow this year, and despite that fact that I think deer are great and cute; I can see them on the Animal Planet, and knowing they are roaming about isn’t helping me enjoy the winter (and the driving in the snow) at all.

So instead, I’m sitting at work googling harmless symptoms and turning them into major illnesses. Jake gets these weird bumps on his back, not really a rash, and you can’t even see them but they come and go all the time, and I can feel them when I give him his nightly back scratch. I’ve tried to get Rob to confirm the bumps, but he keeps saying if Jake has some weird skin disease he doesn’t want to touch it, but thanks anyway. I guess it’s kind of like the “ew I think this tastes bad, you taste it” thing. So I was googling “small bumps on back” because now that I have the internet, I seem to think that I can accurately diagnose most illnesses with my knowledge of search engines as opposed to an actual medical degree. I somehow ended up looking at pictures of people with flesh eating bacteria, and really DON’T DO IT. I will freak you right out, and um it’s really pretty easy to get. Did you know it’s caused by a simple strep virus gone crazy? That people can be carrying this virus and not even be sick, and not even know it, but something as simple as a pin prick can give you flesh eating bacteria? I’m not a hypochondriac (in fact I’m the exact opposite, whatever “I avoid thinking about medical things generally and going to the doctor” is) and I’m certainly not a germaphobe (I will totally do the 5 second rule and eat chocolate off the floor, heck if it’s good chocolate I might even follow the 5 hour rule), but I totally did NOT need to know that.

I bet doctors totally hate the internet, because I’m guessing I’m not the only person that believes their ability to type key words into a search engine makes them a medical genius. Any weird little symptom, esp. any symptom Jake has? Well I’m googling it pretty much immediately. A couple years ago I had myself convinced that Jake’s bad case of the oral herpes virus (cold sores) was leukemia. Like convinced enough that I made DH take us to KidCare immediately and I was in tears the entire way.

Frontline has a special this week on what kids are doing on-line, and it’s pretty staggering how unaware many parents are of what their kids are doing, and it’s not medical research. We haven’t really had to cross that bridge yet really, it’s not too hard to protect a 5 year old that is only interested in playing Disney Playhouse and Nick Jr. but even at that, he’s saavy enough on the computer he could see some things pretty quickly that I don’t want him to see, and most of them have nothing to do with flesh eating bacteria.

I was involved in a discussion recently with some people on whether parenting is harder today than it was in the past. I don’t think it is, I think parenting has always been challenging, for example in the past most people almost counted on loosing one or more of their children before they became adults, which I can’t even imagine dealing with (let alone dealing with giving birth in some of the circumstances women gave birth in). Parenting today does present some unique challenges that our parents just didn’t have to deal with, and the pervasive media is a big one. I worry about that, because I’m fairly saavy with a computer, but I’m really not that “plugged in” to technology, it’s just not my thing really. I find the constant need to photograph and communicate everything all the time to be invasive to just living, like we are living our own lives as our own personal paparazzi, and yes, I completely get the irony of writing this sentence in my blog. It’s the reason I was reluctant to start a blog at all, because I don’t want to be conscious of how I’m presenting my life for public consumption (which comes with the assumption that I have a “public” that even cares). I don’t want my life to become a series of bloggable moments, or photo shoots, and it can quickly get there. I like that internalized “remembering” that becomes a bit dull around the edges with time, because things become softer, and infused with more emotion, when they aren’t just there in black and white. I don’t need 8,000 songs available to me at any second, I don’t want to see the weird outfit the girl in front of you at the grocery store has on, and I certainly don’t need to overhear intimate details of people’s lives as they talk in public on phones as if it’s private space, heck I don’t even need the 50+ T.V. channels I have. (Holy cow, I’m getting old!!!)

Yet I can’t get out of this world that we live it, it is what it is, and I can’t pretend it’s going to go away. Heck considering the difference in the last decade (remember those big bulky “car phones in the “90’s”?) I have no idea what new and improved scary things we may even be dealing with in 5-10 years. It’s really hard to find the right line between overprotecting your kids, and letting them have too much freedom. I’m not even sure there is a “right” line, just seems there are an awful lot of wrong ones. I have no idea what the answer is, and other than “no private computers in our house that connect to the internet”, I need to come up with some lines soon.

I will say, if I were you, I would totally draw my personal line at googling flesh eating bacteria and elephantitis, trust me on this…