Addendum

Addendum to yesterday's entry.

I talked with my sister via phone last night, and she told me that our mom the retired nurse has now figured out how to use "the Google."

And has thus started finding, and telling my sister about, all the sites that talk about how rare spontaneous coronary artery dissections are, about how 70% are only discovered on autopsy, about how there are only around 200 cases in the literature going back to the early 1900s, several case studies where all the outcomes were "death," etc. It's true that if you Google "spontaneous coronary artery dissection," you have to go through several of the search results to get to a positive outcome, granted. But hey, there's me--a living, breathing positive outcome. :)

My sister says our mom is about as wigged out as our mom ever gets about medical stuff. Which is saying a lot, because with her background, she's usually pretty level-headed about that kind of thing. Historically it's been the rest of the family freaking out about something medical, and we would turn to her for calm, reasonable information.

Mama's also decided, and my sister concurs, that it's best not to show these sites to our dad, who has a pessimistic nature anyway. I mean, when my folks came up this past weekend to visit and bring me lunch and whatnot, Daddy, bless his heart, said to me--"Good thing this isn't 50 years earlier; they would have just sent you home with a prescription for digitalis and waited for you to die..." Now mind you, he was talking about the advances in medical science and how far things have come, and he referenced his own case of detached retinas and how if they'd happened several years earlier, he'd be blind in both eyes. But still, he can definitely be a "glass half empty" type, and I can be too.

But I'm trying to focus on the fact that my toast landed butter side up. I'm in the 30%. My dissection happened basically right there while a team of professionals could fix it on the spot. I mean, I even get to be a teaching tool; how cool is that?

But Heaven help me, my mom can Google now.