After a period of quiet contemplation in the smallest room in my house, I searched out my cell phone and using the bathroom mirror to allow me to see the image I was about to take, I snapped an image of my right eye. Then I e-mailed it to my doctor with a note saying words to the effect of do I need to see you for this or can you tell me what it is and what to do about it so that I can stay home and keep dry?
Within a half-hour, I had his response - what I had was not a particularly big deal, and I could take care of it at home without ointments or other medication just the application of hot water on a regular basis to the affected eye lid.
I had a couple of follow-up questions, so I rang the doctor, and we had a very pleasant chat, during which he observed that he had already filed electronically a "low-level" claim with Medicare. Well, that surprised me -- that is, that Medicare was sufficiently up-to-date that they could handle something like this. The doctor said that with my image and e-mail long with his e-mail response, he had enough to file a claim. Fine with me.
In finishing up the conversation he said with some apparent delight that I was his first e-patient and that I was beginning to catch a glimpse of part of our medical future... remote diagnosis and treatment done electronically.
Now obviously one cannot do this sort of thing with a doctor when you've fallen down on the floor and broken a leg, but when some of the niggling problems either aren't worth driving to the doctor's office or can possibly be dealt with over the telephone, even with the technology as simple as a cell phone image, well then maybe this brave new electronic world isn't going to be so awful after all.
At this stage of the game, I've given up updating my resume, but I do think it would be fun to have listed among my few accomplishments that of my newly found status as an e-patient.
(I have been learning a new computer-based dictation program, and this blog entry is the first to use that software. I have made a number of mistakes as I've gone along but all in all, I'm really amazed at how relatively easy dictating this rather than typing it has been. My thumbs, overworked after 50 some years of typing almost every day, welcome the respite.... If future entries seem to have been created by someone else, you can blame the software. That's what I plan on doing.)
