Choosing my sources

Most of the time, Peggy from King of the Hill is my Oprah who I look to for advice about everything from clipping my toenails to choosing my life partner. With one exception: on one episode her son Bobby hurt himself and she rushed to the computer to google his symptoms and said, “I swear, I don’t know how people raised children before the internet.” After being pregnant for five months, I can say that people probably raised their kids without knowing everything they could know about how to do it, but they were also able to function without the paralyzing knowledge of worst case scenarios for every situation. After my first expedition into the internet world on the subject of pregnancy I was pretty sure that I had miscarried and was no longer pregnant due to the horror stories I encountered from WebMD and pregnancy chat rooms. When an ultrasound technician told me I was still pregnant I swore to never google on the topic again. Recently, I gave it another try and thought it would be less scary because all I was looking up was, “back pain sleeping pregnancy.” But no. It turns out I was probably experiencing pre-term labor. What? The thing is, no one goes on the internet and writes, “I had lower back pain during my pregnancy that turned out to be nothing more than lower back pain and I sucked it up.” They write about the urban legend that their girlfriends who have never been pregnant told them about. Whatever. I’m sticking to Paris Hilton searches from now on because there is no such thing as scary information on that topic.