Help Save Your Own Life

By TAD BARTIMUS

Say the word "internet" and everybody's an expert : "greatest thing since sliced bread," "purveyor of pornography," "the reason marriages break up," "best educational tool since Gutenberg invented moveable type."

Love it or hate it, the internet has connected the world. Foes brand it a tool of Satan that will lure us away from hearth and home, fry our brains, alienate us. Boosters believe its creation was a stroke of genius that could, through communication, help eliminate war, illiteracy and totalitarianism.

Your average teenager uses it to find a date, do homework, order a pair of sneakers. Retirees burn up the wires talking to classmates they haven't seen in 40 years, trace family trees, make sure their congresswoman votes right on Medicare. We all use it to get information: check our stock portfolio, read the headlines, talk back to Madonna.

Listening to old friends recount their medical odyssey of the past two years, I suddenly realized the internet can also help us save our own life. While the husband did battle with cancer his wife – a computer illiterate – set out to master the world wide web to become his fiercest protector.

Using every search engine and portal she could find, she spent hundreds of hours tracking down leukemia symptoms, treatments, drug trials and specialists.

"Really sick people need an advocate," she said. "I knew that if I was going to be my husband's I couldn't overlook a single sentence that might make a difference."

When she wasn't by his side through radiation, chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant, my friend was in front of a computer screen, scrolling through thousands of medical web sites. She became so proficient at links she can still rattle them off like most parents can recite their children's names.

"The doctors hated to see me coming," she said. "I'd be armed with all these internet printouts and I'd start asking all kinds of questions, referring to this study in Spain, that study in Finland. Finally, one specialist I thought wasn't up to speed finally said: 'I have to be frank. You're much more current on this than I am. I have a lot of homework to do before we meet again.'

"The great thing it was that I didn't feel so inadequate and helpless. There really is something you can do to be useful while the person you love is suffering. All my life I've heard that 'information is power.' With the internet, there's nothing to stop an average person from becoming an expert on anything. The power is sitting out there in cyberspace, just waiting to be found."

Research that previously took weeks, even months and years, to find in libraries is available in the time it takes to say "you've got mail." Log on for information about heart disease or multiple sclerosis or arthritis; in seconds, with a click of one finger, we can access every single known fact about the condition, plus we can find a specialist to walk us through the terminology.

The internet could turn out to be the greatest medical miracle of all. And the more we use it, the better we get at narrowing our options and making informed decisions. We can become virtual neighbors with experts around the globe.

"The doctors wanted to do a radiation procedure we were really leery of," my friend said. "I found an obscure study that showed only one in five patients with my husband's condition survived it. It was the classic case of 'the cure is worse than the disease.' Because of that study we were able to persuade the doctors to take another look. They were shocked, and they changed their mind and canceled the procedure. We think that decision may have saved my husband's life."

Just a cautionary note; if you're a hypochondriac, don't try this at home. After surfing medical web sites for several hours I was convinced I had at least six fatal conditions. I asked my friend, based on her experience, what I should do. She replied:

"Take two aspirin and call me in the morning."

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