Medical Kryptonite

A soothing Costa Rica sunset picture, courtesy of my daughter. I should make a point to look at soothing sunset photos before I ever open up my “MyHealthOnline” app.

I am not a fan of the “My Health Online” app.

It notifies me of test results instantly before anybody with any medical sense can explain them to me first. I am not a doctor. I did not want to be a doctor. One of the things I know most certainly about myself is that I would make a terrible doctor. So why is my healthcare app treating me like one, sharing information with me with the ridiculous notion that I should understand these things?

Because health information shows up so quickly there! Lab results, scan results, imaging results: as soon as they are in the system, the system alerts my phone, and my phone notifies me. I’m sure the news goes to my doctor at the same time, but since my doctor has many patients and test results to wade through, the fact that I get them first without the help of my doctor’s wisdom? For me, this is alarming. I am already prone to hypochondria; medical test results are a kind of kryptonite for me, especially if they appear on a chart which highlights results that are out of the norm, even if they are only a little off. Often, results like that are fine, and a health professional can provide that wise perspective. But for me? I am not a health professional. I see numbers that are too low or too high on my bloodwork (or anything), and I freak out.

I realize I am weird this way. I told my friend how terrible this was, that my phone could beep and alert me with potentially life altering health news while I’m enjoying tea and eggs at my kitchen table in the morning, and she looked a little confused.  “Huh,” she said. “That wouldn’t bother me.”

I had a routine mammogram this week.

The sign on the wall of the changing room said that results would take a week or so, possibly even longer. The morning after my scan, around 8:30 am, I got an alert on my phone that my results were in.

That was fast. Maybe too fast.

Perhaps the technician spied something concerning and put an alert on my scan so that the radiologist (is it radiologists who read x-rays?) looked at it first thing in the morning so they could get me into treatment right away? Maybe something was terribly wrong?

It doesn’t take much for me to hop on to the worry train and speed away. This probably doesn’t surprise you, if you’ve been reading here for awhile. You know that I am prone to anxiety, and it’s not something I am proud of. I try to live in faith and hope. Really, I do! Some days, this is harder than others. Any day that follows a routine medical exam is a day when this will be a challenge for me, especially if test results show up much earlier than expected.

So my heart sped up and my stomach felt queasy and it took oh-so-very-many seconds before I could get my phone unlocked, sign into my darned “MyHealthOnline” app, find the right tab with the scan results, and open the letter.

Basically, everything was fine. (But what if it hadn’t been? What would my day have been like before an actual person had a chance to look at the results and contact me?)

I was grateful, of course. And now I know that the doctors are much speedier with their scan evaluations than it says they will be on the signs in the mammography changing room booths. Overall, that’s a good thing.

Still, I wonder. I wonder if it is the best thing for me, that technology has made it so that I have easy, quick access to information that might not make sense to me. Of course, I could always choose not to look at the results that are sitting there in my phone and wait for a call or letter from my doctor. (Like that would ever happen.) Maybe there should be a box on all the papers that we fill out before a doctor’s appointment that asks if we are prone to health anxiety. “If yes,” it could say, “check here, and test results will be sent to you only after your health professional has looked at the results and has time to discuss them with you.” Not so long ago, that was the only way to get test results.

I think that I miss those days.