Brave New World

Digitization. That's what they've done with medical records. If you can buy a car online now, you can also see what they did to you on your latest ambulatory visit for your back. Photos as well. 

Photos (black and white) of the kind that are inside views of the body and make it look like the doc did reach space through a ride with Bezos or Branson and land on Mars—before you've even gotten home. (I stopped off for a haircut first.)

Without going into as much detail as I got yesterday by my signing into my "account" I'll tell you it came with medicine name, strength, quantity, the gauge of the needle, approach, the fact that I was on a pillow, (not, apparently MyPillow.com. I asked. Sorry Mike Lindell), photos of the fluoroscopy, and the op report, which concluded, nicely, like most op reports I read when I worked for BlueCross and BlueShield, "patient tolerated the procedure well." You like to read that when your name is on the top of the report.

Missing, were the actions of the nice nurse Jenny who treated be royally after the procedure by offering me water and my choice of a snack. Snack? I get a snack? When does this plane reach JFK?

I chose Lorna Doones over pretzels. Wow, Lorna Doones. "When was the last time you had a Lorna Doone?" asks Jennie sweetly. "I might have been 12."

Wasn't Lorna Doone one of those characters I saw on an Illustrated Classics comic book in the back of Siegal's candy store in Flushing? Damn right. I never bought that one, but through Google I now know the plot. Sort of a 17th-century Patty Hearst without F. Lee Bailey. Art before life.

The cookie Lorna Doone reminded me of the shortbread Girl Scout cookies we didn't get this year. I usually get about 5 boxes of different varieties when they're hawking them in the shopping  center. Covid of course eliminated that.

But back to medical records and their digitization. Given the type of medicine I received I immediately thought of a horse being injected with a banned substance.  If I were to have a blood test after a race I'd be DQ'd, the purse would be withheld, suspensions and fines would be levied, and there'd be lawsuits up the gazoo. A normal week for Bob Baffert. Or Olympic athletes, or Tour de France riders.

Of course the digitization of records would not make the game of horse racing more honest. Those doing prohibited things would just not fill out the paperwork.

But I couldn't help thinking about how much information we let out there. Truthfully, I'm not concerned about my records being hacked. I'm too old (Motto: Old enough to know better, too old to care.) to care what the rest of the world knows about me. Or thinks about me.

But there is so much information that gets out there that I can't help think if there is an Afterlife I might be able to log back in moments after death and find out how they tried to save me. With photos, maybe color by then.

The mind boggles.

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