Friday, May 02, 2014

Adventures in Parenting - Chapter 2: Google-itis

Since Larry Page and Sergey Brin rolled out Google in 1998, the unknowns in the world have shrunk drastically. “Google”, which started as a noun has since then been promoted to a verb and the whole host of techies have taken to the verb in a way that a baby duck takes to swimming.

Google has become the omnipotent – provider of all. Whether it is pirated mp3s of the latest Bollywood flick, DVDrip of the latest Hollywood blockbuster or definitions of complex medical terms like bilateral renal pelvic displacia, google knows just where to find them.

What this has accomplished is that everyone with an access to an internet connection and working knowledge of any browser has turned into a self-taught doctor. Rather than what the actual doctor says, people have now started believing the links that Google dishes out.

The one ritual after we got each of the scan report was to come home and religiously google each of the terms in the report. Who cares that the Doctor told everything was normal? We wanted to have Google’s opinion of the same. First couple of times, this exercise went off without any red flags getting raised. Then came the anomaly scan report.

In the anomaly scan report; there was a mention of mild bilateral renal pelvic displacia. During the scan, the Doc performing the scan had certified that everything looks good and there are no issues. But later, while taking a second opinion from Dr.Google, we found that the meaning of mild bilateral renal pelvic displacia is that the baby’s kidneys are larger than they should be. Cue Panic. On further consultation with other webpages referred to by Dr.Google, we came to know that the kidneys should be only around 4.5 mm while in our case it was 4.7 mm. one fifth of a millimeter was proving to be the cause of concern.

There comes another question. Who decides what is normal? In an age where we didn’t have machines which could measure a yet to be born baby’s kidney up to one tenth of a millimeter, didn’t people have babies? What if the baby has larger than average kidneys? The term average itself denotes that there has to be values more than the said number. Otherwise, this wouldn’t be the average. So who says a 4.7 mm kidney is abnormal while a 4.5 mm one is not? It seems to be with more knowledge man gains, instead of getting more answers; he is faced with more questions.

Anyways, this mild state of panic continued till the next scan, where it was certified that the kidneys are now of regulation length and are well within the “normal” range.

Fast forward 3-4 months. My wife spent her maternity leave at home, in Kerala, waiting for the young one to arrive. In Kerala, we had opted to consult Dr. Prameela Philip at Poyanil Hospital, Kozhencherry. During the first scan conducted there, my wife, with all the knowledge gained from Google, asked the doctor about the amniotic fluid level. With what could have been an amused smile, the doctor replied “ Aavashyathinu undu” meaning there is enough. The succinctly worded message within her response that I could decipher was, “Leave the medical worries to us doctors. You just do what we tell you to do”.


In the world where all kinds of information are available at a mere touch of your finger, if only that were possible.