Des Moines, September 02: From anaesthesia to the recovery room, 70-year-old Monna Cleary’s children followed her surgery – 140 characters or less at a time.
Twitter is opening doors to the sterile confines of operating rooms, paving the way for families – and anyone else for that matter – to follow a patient’s progress as they go under the knife.
Most of the Cleary family chose to track the developments from a laptop computer in the hospital’s waiting room. But one daughter-in-law kept tabs from work.
“It’s real time information instead of sitting and not knowing in the waiting room,” said Cleary’s son Joe, hours after his mother’s surgery Monday at St Luke’s Hospital in Cedar Rapids.
“It made the time go by,” said Cleary, who was joined by a brother, two sisters and a sister-in-law at the hospital. “We all feel it was a positive experience.”
His mother, who underwent a hysterectomy and uterine prolapse surgery, had given her OK for hospital spokesperson Sarah Corizzo to post a play-by-play of the operation on Twitter, a social-networking site that lets users send out snippets of information up to 140 characters long using cellphones or computers.
—Agencies