I Stopped Looking Up Symptoms at Midnight
Mabel threw up once, on the rug, at about ten at night. That was the entire event. She then walked off, drank some water, and settled on the arm of the chair looking like nothing had occurred.
By midnight I was sitting in the dark with my phone about four inches from my face, and I had gone from “huh” to a genuine tightness in my chest. I had read a forum thread from 2011, most of a page written by somebody selling something, and a list of conditions arranged in what I can only describe as ascending order of horror. I was not calmer. I was not better informed. I was just frightened, on a Tuesday, about a cat who was asleep six feet away.
What that search was actually doing
Looking back at it honestly, I was not gathering information. I was collecting worst cases and then trying to talk myself out of them, one at a time, with nothing to work with.
The structural problem is that a search engine cannot tell the difference between “this happened once and she is fine” and “this has happened every day for a week and she has stopped eating.” I can type the same three words in both situations and get the same page. A person cannot make that mistake. The first thing anybody at a clinic asks is how often, since when, what else. Those questions are the actual medicine of the conversation and there is no way to ask them of a search box.
The other thing is volume. Every rare and terrible outcome that ever happened to anybody is written down somewhere, in detail, by someone who needed to write it. The thousands of times it was nothing are not written down at all, because nobody posts about the evening their cat was briefly sick and then completely fine. What I was reading was a survivorship problem wearing the costume of research.
The call took four minutes
I did not sleep well and I called the clinic when they opened. I described what I had seen: once, that time, no other changes, eating normally, drinking, using the box, acting like herself. The person on the phone asked me a couple of things I had not thought to mention and then told me what would warrant coming in and what would not, and said to call back if any of that changed.
Four minutes. It cost nothing. And it did what six hours of my own reading had entirely failed to do, which was give me a threshold. Not reassurance exactly. A line, so I knew what I was watching for.
That was the moment the trade became obvious to me. I had spent two hours of my life to feel worse, when four minutes with somebody qualified would have settled it. I now think of the midnight search as the expensive option.
The trip where nothing was wrong
I should say that I have gone the other way too, and I do not regret that one either.
Rowan was off one weekend. Not dramatically. Quieter than usual, not interested in the thing he is always interested in, lying down in a room he does not usually lie down in. I could not point at anything. I called, described it, and they told me to come in that afternoon.
He was fine. Whatever had been going on had passed by the time we were in the room, and he was in there doing his full charming idiot routine while I stood next to him feeling like a man who had wasted everybody’s time.
Our vet was completely matter of fact about it. She said she would much rather see a dog who turns out to be fine than have somebody sit at home talking themselves out of a visit, and that the description I gave her was reasonable grounds to check. I have thought about that a lot. Given how the other story in my life went, the one where I waited two weeks, I will take an unnecessary trip over a delayed one every single time.
What I do with that time now
Instead of searching, I write. It is a plain note on my phone with a date on each line, and it takes ten seconds.
What I saw, when it happened, whether it had happened before, whether she is eating and drinking normally, whether anything at home changed. That last one catches more than you would think. New floor cleaner, a bag of food from a different shop, guests in the house, furniture moved, a week of me leaving earlier than usual.
Two things come out of this. First, writing it down slows me down enough that I stop spiralling. Second, when I do call, I have something real to say rather than “she seemed weird on, I want to say, Sunday?” The people asking me questions can do a lot more with a timeline than with my anxiety.
What I still use the internet for
Not nothing. Clinic hours, which I have wrong in my head half the time. Where the nearest after hours place is and how long it takes to get there, which I looked up on a calm afternoon and saved, because looking that up while upset is a bad plan.
And I use it to write down my questions before an appointment. I get about ninety seconds of clear thinking in an exam room before the dog does something and I lose my train of thought entirely, so I go in with three things written down. That is a genuinely good use of a phone.
What I do not do anymore is type symptoms into a box at midnight. The answer to that is always going to be either nothing useful or everything terrible, and neither of those is the thing I actually needed, which was somebody who could ask me a question back.
