Health 2.0 Case Study (My Appendectomy)

It’s all fun and games until somebody loses an appendix… Speaking of the appendix, I just gave mine away on Friday after waking up with a horribly indescribable pain. Due to my inclination to be online most of the time anyway, I decided that the internet was going to be an integral part of my experience as soon as I noticed something was awry.

My friend Fran Melmed recently asked: what the heck is health 2.0? After my experience on Friday, I have some thoughts on what it could be…

Something Is Wrong

We’ve been living in our bodies our whole lives, and whether we would like to admit it to anybody else, at the time, or not… we know when something is wrong. I think that this is the point where information is needed the most. Panic and denial can easily creep into your psyche at this stage in the game, so credible information sources are great for early stage self triage.

In my situation, I woke up at 5:00am with a horrible stomach pain, unlike any other I had previously experienced. I don’t know about you, but I always try to figure out a possible cause whenever I experience gastro-intestinal challenges, so I kicked myself for eating goat cheese for the first time ever the night before. After my groggy self diagnosis, I did what any blue-blooded American would do, I tried to alleviate myself of the problem and having no success, I decided that I would curl up in the fetal position and attempt to sleep it off.

When I woke up in pain still at 7:30am, I thought that I might have a problem that had nothing to do with goat cheese. This was the point where I needed information, and fortunately for me I found it on WebMD.

Personal Research

I wanted to rule out the goat cheese so I Googled goat cheese allergy and found that I wasn’t exhibiting any of the symptoms of being allergic to goat cheese. That’s when I started to poke around my abdomen and started to think that my appendix may be causing me the pain.

So I cruised to the appendicitis symptoms page on WebMD and read through it. What got me was the part about many people being unable to describe the pain. It was definitely unique. Something else noteworthy was that symptoms may vary. Nausea being a symptom that I was not experiencing. And that the pain should be most intense in the lower right quadrant of my abdomen.

Don’t you just love those kinds of descriptions without any context? How am I supposed to know how my abdomen breaks up into quadrants? Right, they had a picture. Brilliant. That was exactly where it was most intense. I then had enough information to not feel stupid about calling my doctor.

Professional Verification

I’m not a doctor and I don’t play one on TV, so I figured that I should call mine for an over the phone consult before rushing to the Emergency Room. I got a hold of her, and described my symptoms. Obviously she couldn’t diagnose me over the phone but we could talk about options. It was around 8am and she told me that she could get me in at 11:45am if I wanted to wait, but she would more than likely order a blood test and a CAT scan for me anyway. That would mean I could drive around town in the snow with a sore belly, or just cruise to the Emergency Room where they could check me out and administer all of those tests in the same place.

I am on a High Deductible Health Insurance Plan with a Health Savings Account, so I asked about any cost differences between the two ways forward. She told me that they would be negligible. Being that it all came down to convenience for me, the fact that I had a good idea about what was wrong, and that I was pretty uncomfortable at this point I opted for the Emergency Room.

aside I think that this part was huge. Obviously I trust my doctor, but in this situation we both knew that there were limitations to what she would be able to do, if my problem was what we both suspected that it might be over the phone. I was then able to make a decision, with some rough financial facts in hand, on my next course of action. Doctors have the knowledge and experience… I see them as a huge part of any Health 2.0 solution, but maybe not always in exactly the same ways that they are or have been utilized.

Possible Health 2.0 Experience

Being the nerd that I am about the internet, I thought it would be cool to tweet during the experience to see what would come of it. I got some responses from @FLPhysicianJobs and @jphoff which were awesome. I also received some direct messages from a local Twitter friend, @bankdraft, which were cool because she identified herself as a nurse.

aside That got me thinking… How cool would it be for nurses and patients to tweet back and forth during the waiting period? Which was rather lengthy. I mean there were something like 10 different nurses who interacted with me throughout the day, so it’s not like there’s some sort of shortage. Seriously though, I felt totally engaged tweeting updates with somebody who knew what they were talking about while I waited. She even followed up with me two days later to see if I was taking my meds. Which was an awesome reminder. I was taking them anyway, because it’s not everyday that I get to take a narcotic, but we had “gone through the surgery together,” so I also didn’t want to let her down by not taking my meds.

I also talked with my boss while tests were being run, and got to hear how his wife made him take a cab to the hospital at 4am when he had to get his appendix removed. It was cool to be able to talk with somebody who had been through what I was about to go through, who could tell me that it wasn’t that big a deal. How huge would it be if all patients could be connected in real time to facilitate this type of conversation as well?

Friends & Family

This appendix thing was unexpected, but pretty routine for the pros at Floyd Memorial, so I didn’t want to burden friends and family with the knowledge of my ailment until after it had been remedied. Facebook came in handy for this, as my wife let the cat out of the bag after I called her to tell her I made it through and I followed up with a comment on her post as well as a status update of my own.

Presumably, I could have been Facebooking while waiting for the procedure as well… But the truth of the matter is that I really didn’t want close connections to worry over something that I felt wasn’t that big of a deal. That was my choice, and I realize that there is give and take between finding people to relate with your procedure and causing unnecessary worry by letting people in on real-time health updates.

Fin

That was my experience in a nutshell. And I’ve written all of this to say that I think that there are real, inexpensive ways for Health 2.0 to start to take a foothold in the United States. It’s easier than ever for possible patients to access information on medical conditions, plus it’s relatively easy to connect with health professionals and patients like you in real time. There is no real excuse, that I can think of, to not start experimenting with some of the tools that are currently available and free.

What do you think?