Trusting Information

Today, something happened to me, and I couldn’t look up any information about it.

Where I live, staff usually do monthly checkups and the like. At about 9 a.m., a certified nurse’s assistant (CNA) enters my apartment after asking if she can come in. She’s here to look at my vitals, just because.

Everything’s all good until she gets to checking my blood pressure. It’s low. Really low. Seventy over forty-five. I don’t know why it’s so low. I’m not diabetic or anything like that. I don’t have any heart problems, though I do have asthma. I drink quite a lot of fluids, and I’m relatively active. Okay, I lied just now. I’m occasionally active. I walk around the apartment complex, and I walk around the city. I know that’s not much exercise, but still, I feel fine.

The CNA asks if I’m okay and if I feel dizzy. I say no, I don’t feel anything of the sort, but she checks my blood pressure again. It’s the same. We trudge up to the nurse, who tells me the same thing. It’s low. She asks if I’ve been drinking fluids. I explain that I have indeed. In fact, since 7:00 this morning, I’ve consumed about half of Lake Michigan.

After a few more tests and some water, she tells me to come back to her office so she can monitor how I’m doing. I immediately race to my apartment and sit down at my desk. I spread my fingers over the keyboard, wishing they could strike the commands to bring up Firefox.

My fingers pound out a query for Google to parse only to meet with a message saying I have no internet connection. Then, I return to reality. Ah, yes, I don’t have the internet. I can’t look things up. I’m forced to depend on what people tell me because I don’t have any medical books.

Since I don’t have the internet, I need to delegate everything to specialists in certain fields. I’m limited by what they know. The prospect is truly daunting—-or perhaps I’m just not used to being offline yet.

I know people aren’t supposed to be their own doctors, and I know that even if you do your own research, you’re supposed to follow up with a specialist. I firmly believe you should follow up, certainly. But today, I feel like a child learning how to read. I have to trust people around me because I don’t have the tools to look anything up myself.

I wonder if looking things up is part of my journalistic nature or something the internet has taught me to do. The invention of the internet allowed people to research anything in the world within a few moments.

I haven’t had a chance to call the public library today to see if they have a medical encyclopedia. But I’ll call my library for the blind this week to see if they have one.

I’m the kind of person who feels comfortable knowing the basics of things and, even better, having the tools to look up what I don’t understand or what I want a second opinion on. One might say that I could ask people, but if I asked a gym teacher a question such as, “Why was my blood pressure low?” the chances are they wouldn’t know the answer. There’s a certain absolute to the infinite internet.

Weirdly, I’m of two minds about what happened today. If I had the ability to look things up, how much would I really have learned? I’m sure one web page would have said one thing and another site would have said something else. At least with a specialist, such as the nurse I saw earlier, I can always have a definite answer, even if it’s “I don’t know.” The internet is filled with opinions and medical blogs that may not be very accurate and whose authors won’t know the specifics of my situation.

But in the end, I must trust the people I ask since I don’t have the internet to fall back on. I’ve been wondering, throughout the night, which is the greater risk? Is it the lack of solid information when you’re trying to look something up using massive, global infrastructure with no filter? Or is it the information residing with others and not at your fingertips, obliging you to trust, to a sufficient degree, that what you’re told is somewhat on target, based on the knowledge this person has acquired? Which is the greater risk when your life may be on the line? I have no idea. But I did eat a cookie while I tried to ponder an answer. I found myself wishing I could look up the cookie’s ingredients.