T.M.I.

We are mugged every moment we are awake.  We live in an age of information assault.  Smart phones making the highest of our IQs seem dumb, internet endlessly spewing facts, well maybe not facts, that we didn’t know we needed and YouTube vids detailing how to bathe our pre-adolescent hamster.   

So much noise to sift through to find the nuggets of knowledge we didn’t even know we needed.  By the end of the day….we fall asleep hoping our dreams won’t be filled with all that noise.

Information becomes, in general, knowledge.  Even wrong information can become important knowledge.  But, at what point does information become overload and leave you wondering did I really need to know that?  Can you be too informed?  Do you really need to know how to bathe that pre-adolescent hamster?  When does this onslaught become TMI?   

Being informed is one thing.  Being overwhelmed with information is a bad thing.

 I remember when I was first diagnosed my wife and I went on a terror of information gathering.  I would read one site that said eat alfalfa and another that refuted alfalfa and recommended dill, ginger and essence of bat gonad.  Still other sites maintained that irradiating your food instead of your lesions would produce results that would be effective only if all was done on a full moon in August.

During that early research I checked out a book that was written by an informed doctor and all chapters, from beginning to just before the last chapter were very informative.  I say just before, as the prelude to the final chapter of the book, was the doctor/author explanation of what the last chapter contained and some readers were upset and other readers were appreciative.  The final chapter of the book was about how someone with this disease dies

I read it.  Wish I hadn’t.  To this day, more informed, knowledgeable and prepared I wish I hadn’t read that chapter as in my deepest moments of scary scary the imagination dances through my mind.   My wife, when I tearfully told her I had read that chapter responded.   “&^@#@ why would you do that *&^%4?”  She was right.  Too Much Information.

Once, a loved and trusted person in my life during a discussion of subject that I can’t remember said. “In the winter if you don’t listen to the morning’s weather report will the roads be any less treacherous?”

At first I thought that comment seemed silly and not applicable to the discussion.  Then I thought about it a little and deduced that what was meant was hiding your head in the sand doesn’t divert the outcome. Then, then, I figured out why that statement was so wrong.

The mind is a powerful thing.  Think positive and positive things happen and vice versa.  It is like telling a child with a full cup of “water don’t spill it honey.”  What the hell?   The farthest thing in that child’s [sane] mind is spilling the water.  Now, by your warning, you just put the thought of the possible spillage outcome in the child’s mind. The weatherman has placed by his warning, the option of sliding off the road in my mind.  Too Much Information.

  

I’m not going to read that last chapter anymore, or search and read the site’s that bemoan my plight and my supposed helplessness due to a bat gonad shortage.  I will continue to be informed but I will not let the radio weatherman even accidently plant the seed that I may not be able to steer the course that I’ve set before me.  I will filter out T.M.I.

By the way, today my Onc said there are plenty more options then Bat Gonads left in my long future.

T.M.I.?