grinds my gears

My sister always told me not to do it while pregnant but I, of course, still did. and then just about everyone around me told me not to do it after my stillbirth and I still did. But now I practice what I preach and constantly tell my own friends :

don't Google "medical" information. Just don't. 

This goes for any and all medical issues but especially when you are pregnant or when your child is sick. 

Talk to your doctor. 

A REAL LIVE DOCTOR.

Websites like WebMd.com have decent health-related articles or useful tools to check things like the side effects of certain medication. These features make sense to me. But the symptom checker and the list of causes for particular diagnoses are just...infuriating and almost insulting.

Google a potential issue a child may have. Guarantee you one of the "causes" listed will somehow point the finger back at something the parents may or may not have done while pregnant or while the baby was an infant. If you are a loss mom, or the mom of a sick child, the LAST thing you want to do is check a website like this and see that you may have been the "cause" of your child's condition! 

Do you know how many months I blamed myself for the death of my daughter before I finally found the courage to speak with a REAL LIVE maternal fetal medicine doctor to hear her confirm that I did not kill my baby. I even paid $50 for it! One site listed "lack of nutrition in the womb" as a possible cause of stillbirth, another said regular exercise can help prevent it from happening - the guilt immediately set in and I quickly took the blame for Evie not surviving.  

What's even worse are the generalizations made as these sites attempt to inform readers what a stillbirth is as if every woman and pregnancy are the same. What a joke. Not to mention they read as if a high school-er wrote them for their senior health project. 

How can you blame the woman who chose to move forward with the pregnancy and dedicate the next 10 months of her life nurturing the baby inside of her that she barely gets to see, knows nothing about except maybe a gender, but loves unconditionally anyways. We are told to live life normally and to stay active, here's a list of foods & medicine to stay away, but most importantly do not stress over anything. If you follow these steps, you should have a healthy baby.  But when we don't, the mother must have strayed away from what they were told...right?

 Well, Mr. WebMD, since you are such a know-it-all, while you are at it, please explain to me why there are plenty of drug-addicted malnurished self-centered women who deliver healthy babies everyday. And what about the extremely fit health-conscience women who lose babies every day. Riddle me THAT.