Dr. S comes into the room while my feet are awkwardly situated in the stir-ups that are infamous to all post-pubescent women. This is the first time I’ve ever seen her. She asks me a couple of questions that I’ve already answered for nurses at least three times this visit. I mention some pain I’ve had, symptoms that I know coincide with a number of common and not-so-common ailments. She pokes and prods in the usual way, tells me my uterus is a little enlarged, suggests an ultra sound. I don’t know what this means, but she dismisses my questions, tells me it’s probably nothing to worry about. I schedule the two hundred dollar ultra sound that I really can’t afford—I don’t have health insurance—but the results come back negative, according to the nurse who calls me a week later. Negative for what? “Well, for anything. You have a perfectly healthy uterus.” But she doesn’t know why they were examining my uterus to begin with, and neither do I. I have so many concerns, but my doctor doesn’t share them and I can’t afford more visits.

I try to resist WebMD. The doctors I’ve seen typically frown upon medical information garnered from websites, afraid that patients have manifested symptoms simply from looking up diseases and convincing themselves that they have them. It happens, I know. And while I’ve never actually had this happen to me, I’ve definitely spent nights worrying myself sick (literally) over symptoms I share with cancer patients and sufferers of brain tumors, absolutely convinced I have leukemia, heart disease, Chron’s disease, bipolar disorder, diabetes, fibromyalgia. My symptoms are common, vague, and possibly unrelated: constant fatigue, indigestion, frequent lower abdominal pain, irregular periods, nausea, daily headaches, occasionally painful urination, depression, anxiety. WebMD is discouraging and inconclusive. But then, so are doctors. Despite today’s over-abundance of information, discovering the truth about anything is nearly impossible—probably because of that overabundance. It’s hard to find a needle in a haystack, but it’s ever harder to find a needle in a box of needles. That’s what it feels like, trying to find an answer on the web.

Despite all of my previous failed attempts at diagnosing myself, when I get off the phone with Dr. S’s nurse, I look up “enlarged uterus.” WebMD suggests fibroid tumors or something called adenomyosis, which typically occurs only in women who have had children, which isn’t me. I have all of the symptoms listed with fibroid tumors, except the tumors themselves; they would’ve shown up on the sonogram. I move on, quickly ruling out cervical cancer (which shows up during routine screenings) and uterine cancer (which typically only happens post-menopause).

I look up ovarian cancer, just to rule that out. The first thing the site tells me is that ovarian cancer often has no symptoms; it’s one of the diseases referred to as a “silent killer.” That’s comforting. WebMD then lists some more vague symptoms that I tend to possess on a daily basis: bloating, pain in belly or pelvis (do they mean the pelvic bone? Or the general pelvic area? Where is that, exactly? There’s no explanation offered), difficulty eating, urinary problems, fatigue, indigestion; and advises me that “if you have one or more of these symptoms, and it occurs almost daily for more than two or three weeks, talk with your doctor.” Then it adds, “But these symptoms are also common in some women who don’t have ovarian cancer.” So I’ve learned, basically, nothing. After spending a few more hours clicking around on the site, chasing links and definitions to Wikipedia and beyond, I give up. I decide that if my symptoms meant something conclusive, my doctor would’ve discovered it, and I leave the site alone.

A few months later my mother calls me. “Check your e-mail. Now. I’m in a bar, I can’t say things out loud, but check your e-mail.” She’s sent me an important link about ovarian cancer. This time, it’s a checklist on doctoroz.com, made by doctors (specifically, Dr. Oz), for someone to fill out and present to her doctor at the next visit. There’s days of the week and a chart for me to fill out when I have what symptoms, if I so desire. At the bottom it reads, for the doctor, “I am concerned about these symptoms and would like you to consider a recto-vaginal exam, a transvaginal ultrasound and a CA-125 test in addition to other tests needed to make a diagnosis.” How convenient. It offers little else by way of explanation, just proclaims that ovarian cancer is a “silent killer” and that people shouldn’t take their symptoms lightly. But I don’t have health insurance, so WebMD’s all I’ve got. And, honestly, real doctors explain things even less.

Real doctors also aren’t completely accurate at simple diagnostics, either. Six months later, without any changes to my health whatsoever, I’m suddenly overwhelmed by a searing, constant burn in my lower left side. I’m writhing from the pain on the way to the hospital, doubled over trying to walk up to the emergency room counter, throwing up whenever I had to move because the pain was so intense. After two hours, a CT scan, and a couple shots of morphine, I’m told that I have a two-and-a-half inch benign tumor on my left ovary. It’s the size of a golf ball.

Are you fucking kidding me.

I give my doctor the benefit of doubt, figure it must’ve grown quickly, it must’ve been too small to notice back in April[1]. I don’t get a lot of details, and there are a lot of things I forget to ask. Dr. S, as before, is curt in her responses to my questions, probably assuming that the less I know, the less I’ll be freaked out. But she doesn’t understand. I need to know absolutely everything. There isn’t a scrap of knowledge that my generation can’t unearth on Google, and we feed on that knowledge, have access to it in the classroom, in our bedrooms, on our phones. Everything is out there to be discovered and we want all of it, every grimy dirty detail about where babies come from, how diseases develop, what causes super germs, why antibiotic soaps are bad. If there’s something that we can’t find an answer to, that in and of itself is, for us, a fatality.

I have surgery, go home, less pain, large scar, tons of unanswered questions, unable to work for weeks. I’m unclear about the recovery process, how long it will take for my stitches to dissolve, how much pain is normal when I cough, what it feels like to pop a stitch, what my wound should or should not look like while it’s healing. I’m back on WebMD again, inconclusive vagueness and all. I find very little. But it’s still more than I got out of my doctor.

With online options such as the diagnostic checker and checklists created by doctors like Dr. Oz, it should be easier to discover the cause of symptoms, to diagnose diseases, to work together with doctors in order to become more knowledgeable about a condition, to become healthier, or at least more aware of ways to do so. But that’s not what’s happening. Doctors are often vague and distracted with patients, and they actually go so far as to discourage the use of online information gathering, even when they make it our only option. We can’t resist searching for answers, no matter how much they roll their eyes, specifically because of that eye-rolling and what it entails: that they, the doctors, are privy to scores of definitions and intricate details that we’ll never understand. We want to know everything we can about the world we are living in and especially about the bodies we inhabit. If doctors can’t, or won’t, provide us with that information, then we’re going to look into other sources—even if those sources are unreliable.

[1] This is not, apparently, the case. I had a “teratoma,” also known as a dermoid cyst, which grows at an extremely slow rate. In other words, it could have been caught much sooner.