The internet is a wonderful thing in many ways but it can also cause many issues. One of them is the problem of Googling to find out what is wrong with you.
Rachel: I don’t know! I think it’s kind of serious! Oh, you know… I was watching this thing on TV this morning about… Newcastle disease… and I think I might have it!!
The One with the Soap Opera Party (Friends)
Charlie: Oh, Newcastle disease is a secretion borne virus that only affects chickens and… other poultry.
A person could spend half an hour googling and discover they have a disease thought to have been extinct, an appendix about to explode, and that they are pregnant. Which is especially concerning if they have already had their appendix removed and are male. The reality turns out to be that they drank too much alcohol and not enough water the night before.
I had an idea for a science fiction story once. It was a world where doctors could simulate the patient’s condition in themselves. My reasoning behind this was that in doing so the doctor might be better able to prescribe the right medicine. After all we all conceptualise the universe differently. Even in a family you might disagree on if something is red or orange. When we used to play Uno with my grandmother she couldn’t see the difference between the green and the blue. More than that though mightn’t it be tricky to know what is a problem? The human body is going to hurt sometimes and we all have different pain tolerances. If a patient says the have pain in their arm there is really no way to know if that is something that will pass or indicative of something else.
In Star Trek they have the tricorder. I wish this thing existed in reality. I am not like the elephant in this song but it would still be great to have a doctor wave a device over me and know about all that was wrong mentally and physically – and how serious it all was? That technology is, at the moment, indistinguishable from magic as Clarke would say.
Sometimes googling symptoms might yield results. I think it can be a good first step but certainly not the last step. Until such time as we have magical scanning devices we just have to get by with how we feel and decided if we need further help.
I wanted to write this because I know there is something not quite right in my mind. I feel strange a lot of the time. I get upset over small things, I get stressed in situations that others can cope, I am slow where others are fast, I struggle where others do not. And none of this is to get sympathy, that is not what this is about, it is about the human condition.
Fear and anxiety are the easiest emotion I can think of to explain what I an ineptly reaching for. Spiders don’t bother me at all. If I see one in my flat the most I would do is say: ‘Hi, Bert.’ Some people are terrified of them and it doesn’t matter if they know they are harmless. For myself I have difficulty with plans. When I go to work in the morning I will have an idea in my head of what I am doing that evening, even if it is just watching Netflix, and for me it is not such an easy choice if I am invited to the cinema after work – because I had plans.
That is the thing I really want to say from this rambling post. I think we all need to understand what others find difficult. I want to put an example here but I don’t want to offend or embarrass anyone. Some of my issues are weird even to me. Like feeling I shouldn’t have spent so much time on this post. Why? Because it wasn’t on the plan for today.
Maybe this post is too rambling. Maybe it doesn’t make all that much sense and it is just a bunch of words not in a good order. I don’t know. Sometimes things demand to be written. I needed to write it though and try, even if it only makes sense to me, to get somethings out of my brain and on to screen.
In closing I would just like to say I hope you are doing well with whatever fears and difficulties you are facing. And I am going to prove I leaned nothing from studying creative writing by ending on a cliche – ‘You’ve got this.’ Good luck to you, dear reader. Good luck too all of us.
***
I just wanted to say that I have checked this post. I really have. Unfortunately my particular combination of dyslexia and dyspraxia makes it really hard for me to spot typos. Please enjoy and I’ll try not to make too many errors.
I have a Patreon page. I hope you will consider supporting this blog: https://www.patreon.com/unstableorbit
Unstable Orbit 