Beware of the Message Board

I should have learned my lesson about message boards when I was 17 and made the mistake of reading "Hernia Surgery" message boards the night before I was having my own surgery.

It didn't occur to me at the time that the only people who were on those message boards (generally) were those who already had experienced problems. After all, we don't jump online and log into "herniafailures.com" to write about how well it went.

By the time I got to the hospital the next morning I was in a state of inconsolable panic that resulted in hours of weeping in the waiting room and delaying the inevitability that my body was sure to "reject the mesh" and that I would promptly die. None of these things happened.

So here I am again - over a decade older, and none the wiser, and so I find myself scouring message boards and consequently filling my head with all the horrible things that could go wrong. After all they are happening to EVERYONE ELSE on the "multiple miscarriages" page. Yeah, exactly.

Message boards can be useful resources when approached rationally and with perspective (something us pregnant ladies are not known to have a lot of). You can make them work for you as long as you maintain an understanding of the audience and the participants and realize (again) that no one goes on a message board to talk about the good stuff.  People go on message boards to seek advice and comfort when things aren't going according to plan.

It's easy to get caught up in the buzz of negativity if you aren't careful. So, my advice to you - keep reading your message boards for any tidbits of insight that might be helpful to your questions, concerns or specific situation, but be careful to remember that these are generally forums for sharing worries and woes. While it can certainly feel like a majority after scrolling through post after post of a particular problem, it doesn't mean that the bad stuff is happening to everyone. It simply means, that everyone on that message board is experiencing the bad stuff and that is why they're there.

In the grand scheme of things, those people make up a very specialized sample of an infinite universe of baby bumps. Be grateful they are talking because we can learn a lot from them, but don't let the anxiety get in the way of being optimistic that your pregnancy will be a good one.