Dear diary,

today I had something happen to me and I couldn't look up information about it.

Where I live, they usually do monthly check ups and the like. At about 9 AM a CNA, certified nurses assistant, comes into my apartment after asking if she can because, well, she's here to look at my vitals just because.

Everything is all good, until she reaches my blood pressure. It's low. Really low. 70 over 45. I don't know why it would be so low since I am not a diabetic or anything like that. I don't have any heart problems even though I do have asthma... I drink quite a bit of fluids and I am relatively active. OK, I lied just now. I'm occasionally active. I walk from here to the places within the apartment complex and I walk to and from places. I know that’s definitely not exercise, but still, I feel fine.

The CNA asks me if I am OK and if I feel dizzy at all. I answer no, that I don't feel anything of the sort, but she checks it again. It's the same. We trudge up to the nurse where she tells me the same thing as well. It's low. She asks me if I have been drinking fluids. I explain that I have, indeed, been drinking fluids. In fact, at about 7 AM today, I consumed, like, ten bottles of water.

After a few more tests and some water, she tells me to come back to her office so she can monitor how I am doing. I immediately race to my desk in my apartment and sit down in it and spread my fingers over the keys, willing them to strike the commands to bring up Firefox. The actions that I am doing are so automatic that I have totally forgotten that I am disconnected from the Internet.

My fingers pound out a questioned phrase for Google to parse, only to meet the message that says that I don't have an Internet connection and then I return to reality. Ah, yes, I don't have the Internet. I can't look up things. I have to depend upon what people tell me, simply because I don't have any medical books.

Since I don't have the Internet I have to delicate everything through people who are specialists in certain fields, limited by what they know. It really is daunting, or perhaps I'm just not used to being offline yet.

I know people are not supposed to be their own doctor 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 was like a toddler learning how to read. I had to trust people around me because I didn’t have the tools to look it up.

I wonder if that’s my journalistic nature or something that the Internet has taught me to do: look things up. With the invention of the Internet people can understand anything in the world.

I was reading this amazing article in Wired magazine a few months ago about a woman who had diagnosed her own genetic condition because she did years and years of research, speculating documents and things online because she didn’t want to die and because she didn’t have any other distractions to get in her way such as other patience and papers to write. She was disabled so she had all the time in the world to look things up and to contemplate with doctors and other specialists. Since she had the Internet and a lot of free time she could easily look through so many documents in a short amount of time that she could splice useful information from the mundane, dig deeper into things because she knew her families history, and if she didn’t, she had all the time in the world to dig and to look things up. I wish I could look up her name now.

I didn’t have a chance to call the public library today to see if they had a medical encyclopedia but I will call my library for the blind sometime this week and see if they have one.

I am the kind of person who just feels comfortable knowing the basics of things and even better that I have the tools to look up what I don't understand or what I want to have a second opinion on. People can say that I can ask people, but what if I ask a gym teacher a question such as, why was my blood pressure low. Chances are he won't know the answer. There's a certain absolute to the infinite Internet.

People can also say that I can look in an encyclopedia. As I've said before, the blind libraries here in the USA didn’t have any medical encyclopedias, let alone any generic ones. I don't know braille and I don't know an immediate place I can get a large print medical encyclopedia.

In a weird way I am of two minds about what happened today. If I did have the ability to look up things how much would I really have learned, because, I'm sure, one web page would have said something and another would have said something else. At least with a specialist, such as the nurse I saw earlier, I can always have an absolute answer even if It's I don't know. The Internet is filled with opinions and medical blogs that may not be very accurate.

But, in the end, I have to trust the people who I ask since I don't have the Internet to fall back on. I've been wondering, throughout the night, which is the greater evil?

Is it The lack of having solid information because you're trying to look something up on a massively global infrastructure where there isn’t a filter?

Or is it the notion that the information is within other people and not at your fingertips, and that you have to believe in that information and trust that information, to a degree, enough to believe that what you're being told is somewhat on target, based on knowledge this person has acquired?

Which one is the greater evil? I have no idea but I did eat a cookie while I tried to ponder an answer. I even wished I could look up the ingredients to the cookie.

I wonder what kind of evil THAT is

Next Chapter: Chapter 2. Day 2