Anyone is a physician in the internet age. If you’ve got a mysterious ailment, don’t go to the doctor– who wants to the doctor? –just enter a few keystrokes for a free (speculative) diagnosis. Sites like WebMD are probably saving people lots of money and time, in addition to telling women they’re pregnant or dying. But do these sites really do what doctors do- save lives?
At best, they are a weird, real life version of a Woody Allen joke. But that’s not the point.
Last quarter (a unit of time denoting 3-4 months, based on my current school schedule), I started having pain on the left side of my torso. It started south of my nipple and wrapped around my ribcage to my back. But it wasn’t in my chest. It was on my skin. It didn’t hurt all the time; it only bothered me when my shirt would brush against it. Or when I was in bed and the sheet or blanket did the same thing.
I didn’t know what it was, but since it wasn’t constantly bothering me, I didn’t worry about it. It was approaching the end of the quarter and my workload was increasing with an inversely proportional effect on my sleep. I didn’t have time to go to the doctor. Especially not for a possible lame diagnosis, “It’s probably nothing, just try to get some rest and give me a call next week if it hasn’t gotten better.” So I kept it to myself, for the most part. The only person I told was my girlfriend. She was more concerned than I was and she insisted I get it checked out. I didn’t.
I hoped it would go away if I left it alone. It didn’t.
At the time, “The Walking Dead” was in its season debut and probably the best show on TV. I say it was the best because it was the only one I was watching at the time. If you’ve never seen it before, the show is about one man’s search for his family in a world taken over by flesh eating zombies and it takes place in Atlanta. Naturally, I started referring to my new condition as my “zombie bite.” This didn’t comfort my girlfriend.
When I realized the problem wasn’t going away, I looked up the symptoms online. I visited good ol’ Dr. WebMD and listened to its visitors. What I found wasn’t comforting, but it wasn’t alarming. Other people had had the same symptoms, and some in the same place on their bodies. They described it as a sunburn minus the warmth. I hadn’t thought of it that way, but it made sense. Most of them were never diagnosed with anything, if they had gone to see a doctor. But there were a few positive notes.
Some said it was stress-induced and that the condition went away on its own when they were more stress-free. I still had a week and a half until the end of my quarter and panel review so I knew that I’d have to stick it out until then if I wanted to see if this internet diagnosis was correct. It was getting worse or staying the same on a daily basis but I thought I could stick it out. And I did.
I remember the weird pain reminding me it was still there every time I put on a shirt or turned in the middle of the night. Sometimes the seatbelt chimed in too. It was weird being hurt by such soft materials. It was even weirder being hurt by fabric and the like when I was in public, and trying not to let it show. It was all around weird.
I made it through panel and I remember still having it the next day when I flew back home to NJ. But as I bummed around at my parents’ house and slept in for a week, I forgot about the pain. It went away on its own, without a sign it was ever there. It wasn’t until days later that I realized it had gone away.
Now I’m half way through week six of 10 in my current quarter. I’m almost anxious to see if and when it comes back.
