
Throughout history, mothers have dealt with all sorts of challenges. From the Stone Age mom worrying about the best animal skin in which to wrap her baby, to the pioneer woman concerned about the safety of that covered wagon, each generation of mothers has had their cross to bear.
For my generation, it’s the internet.
It used to be that knowledge about raising children and families was passed down from mother to daughter in a fairly unbroken chain. If Great-great-grandma had said that whiskey was just the ticket for easing teething pain, the Great-great granddaughters simply applied whisky and that was most likely the end of the discussion.
But thanks to the internet, it is now possible to Google “teething pain” and come up with (I’m not making this number up) 212,000 results. Not only is that an impossible amount of information to physically read, we have to sift through the pseudo-health sites, the ones that are simply advertising something, and ones from people who may have no idea what they are actually talking about. And how exactly would we know that?
We don’t. And that is the scary part.
And just try Googling an illness. That has got to be the absolute worst. The family emergency I alluded to yesterday was the fact that the Munchkin was diagnosed with a MRSA (drug-resistant) staph infection. My heart practically leaped out of my chest when the doctor told me, and even though he acted rather nonchalant about the entire thing, all I could think about were the horror stories that I read right here on the internet about MRSA.
So I came home and couldn’t resist Googling it. I mean, how could I not? I wanted to be informed, dammit.
Bad, bad, move.
Based on information from both the CDC and the Mayo Clinic websites, both respected sources of health information, either the Munchkin would be just fine or he could possibly die. There didn’t seem to be much ground in between those two. So the night was spent by me crying and wailing and hitting myself over the head that I hadn’t taken him in sooner, as soon as the symptoms had begun. That I had given that horrible bacteria an extra day in which to course unchecked through his blood.
My friends, it was so not pretty.
But it turns out that the Munchkin had acquired what is called CA-MRSA, which is “community-acquired” MRSA. Which didn’t really make me feel all that great, but it tends to be less harmful than HA-MRSA, or “hospital-acquired” MRSA. And now, thanks to the internet, I’m pretty sure I know more about MRSA than 98% of the general population. I totally have a brown belt in MRSA knowledge.
The Munchkin is much better now, thanks to the strong antibiotics that were prescribed to him.
So I’m good for now as well, until the next medical illness that befalls him and that I will be unable to stop myself from Googling.
Oh internets, we’ve truly got a tortured relationship, don’t we?