Just Don’t Google It

They say Google is decreasing our cognitive ability to recall information – If you don’t remember Nicholas Carr’s article “Is Google Making Us Stoopid?” just Google it.  Lately, though, I have fallen victim to another kind of Google danger – paranoia brought on by sports injury search results.

It all started innocently enough – I wanted to find some information on how long it takes a sprained ankle to heal.  The problem is that every horror story of any kind of injury, medical mishap, surgery gone wrong, you name it, is on the Internet and Google has an uncanny ability to find those stories and place them at the top of your results page.

Before I knew it, I was reading about people who were never able to run again, and runners who thought they had a sprained ankle but it turned out to be a stress fracture or some other more serious injury. 

Like a medical student who turns in to a hypochondriac and thinks she has every disease in the book, I started fearing that I fit the symptoms of every ankle horror story out there.  Before I knew it, I was on the phone scheduling an appointment with a sports chiropractor (I read one girl’s post who said that she only wished she had seen her chiropractor sooner.)

But before my scheduled appointment with the chiropractor, I went to see a nurse at the CVS Minute Clinic first.  You see, when I got a bad cold last week, I also starting Googling my “sore throat, runny nose, and ear pressure” symptoms.  Convinced by my research the I had a double ear infection, I paid the full price of a visit to the nurse on my high-deductible plan, just to find out that I all I needed was an over-the-counter decongestant. 

Maybe the worst-case scenario isn’t always the most likely.  Maybe I’m not dying.  And maybe I’m going to be just fine if I don’t freak out about every sign of discomfort and every scary story on the Internet. 

With this glass-half-full approach, I took my cold diagnosis (or rather lack of an infection diagnosis) as a sign that maybe I have been overly sensitive to my healing ankle – or at least these past few weeks I have.  And while I will always believe that it is better to give an injury more time to recover rather than not enough, I have decided to slowly get back a few miles under my eager legs.  I can certainly tell that my right ankle is weaker, but I am happy to say that so far my short, easy runs have been pain-free.

Things don’t always go as expected and when we have an injury, or a heartbreak, or even just a bad day, we sometimes don’t bounce back as quickly as we would like.  But worrying about it rarely helps.  Instead, do your strengthening exercises and hope for the best, and definitely think twice before Googling it.

Boston Week Two Miles: 10 (And about 2 hours of pool running)

This Week's Beer Choice:  NoDa Brewing Company's Santa Baby