Search Engine - The Test

Episode Date: June 13, 2025

A woman gets a disquieting piece of information about her pregnancy, and turns to technology to try to control her future. Second Life - Amanda Hess ( Bookshop ) Support the show! Comment on this episode A playlist of Recommended Search Engine episodes To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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son of a tailor. Here's the thing. I've tried a lot of basics over the years, and most of them just fine. Lately, though, I've been wearing pieces from son of a tailor, and it's one of the brands where you immediately notice the difference. What they absolutely nail is the fit, the quality, and the longevity. Everything is made to measure, so it actually fits your body. No weird bunching, no too tight spots. The fabrics feel premium right away, but more importantly, they hold up. And these are the kinds of pieces you just keep reaching for. They're not trendy, they're just solid. I've been living in their high necktirt lately. It's got this slightly elevated neckline that makes it feel a little more put together, even though it's just a tea.

And the fabric is substantial, but still breathable. So I can wear it all day, layer it, travel in it, it just works. Same with their core t-shirts. They don't lose shape after washing, which is huge. I've also been rotating in their long sleeves and a sweatshirt. Same story. Super comfortable, clean luck, and it actually fits right every time. You can buy now at son of a tailor.com. That's son of a tailor.com. At some point in your life, you're going to have to wait for news that is very important to you personally. News where, depending on the answer, you can imagine your life splitting in two different directions, the direction you really want and the direction you really don't. I had this happen recently. There was an uncertain, scary

medical event, and I did not handle it the way I would have liked. I got obsessive, I got neurotic. I found myself constantly seeking information, even though there was no real information to find. I was ravenously scrolling obscure subreddits, basically harassing chat GPT, trying to puzzle through research papers that, frankly, I had no business trying to understand. I had this delusion, which was that information was going to give me control. information would calm my worries. Instead, it was feeding my worries. It was spiraling me out.

It was helping me lose control of the one thing I possibly could still have controlled, my own mind. The episode in my life resolved. Things turned out fine. And then, just a week later, I read this book. It was a memoir called Second Life. And it was about someone who had an experience

that, despite being pretty different from my own, also contained some aspects that I recognized. The writer had been pregnant, the time in people's lives marked by lots of worry and uncertainty, and then she'd gotten a very scary piece of news about her unborn kid. There's nothing scarier than news about your kids, anything about yourself pales in comparison, and she'd had to decide what information she wanted,

what information she didn't, and how to grapple with something that was both very frightening, but also not entirely certain, It was just a possibility. I asked the writer if we could talk, and she said yes. Can you say your name in what you do? Sure. My name is Amanda Hess, and I am a critic at the New York Times.

And what type of criticism do you say that you do? I generally write internet criticism and pop culture criticism. I'm analyzing the internet as if it were any other piece of media. So we're going to get into your story about pregnancy and about information. Before we get there, I just wanted sort of draw a picture of you as a person in your pre-mom existence. When you talk about being a critic of the internet as if it's another sort of text, like, what has your relationship to the internet been as a person? I always used it a lot. Like, from the moment there was an AOL disc in my parents' house, you know?

Which AOL did you sign up for? There's like two points. know, 3.0 had the buddy list. 2.5 was the last one without it. I just remember, I remember the great AOL was very important to me. I think I started pre-buddy list. Yeah, so that would put you, God, I sound like I'm trying to like prove that I listened to the band when they were sufficiently obscure, but I will say that would put you at 2.0 or 2.5, probably. Okay, yeah. I was really interested in the chat rooms. This is before there were like makeup tutorials everywhere, and I remember sending a question when I was like 11 or 12 to like covergirl.com. You could ask them questions about beauty.

And I asked them like what you should do if you had acne and freckles at the same time, which I'm sure like I would find a million videos about now that honestly like maybe just would have improved my life somewhat. At 12, Amanda first discovered the pattern that most of us fall into with the internet. We learn that it can be an overconfident, unreliable Oracle, one who is often trying to sell us something. But we go to it anyway, because it's often right, and if not, it's at least always there. Flash forward a couple decades. Amanda is now an adult in her mid-30s. We're in the era of iPhones and apps for everything.

And there's this moment in 2019 where Amanda and her husband decide to have a baby. Amanda had been using a period tracker app called Flow, FLO, and after she got pregnant, when she returned to the app, she discovered the app had this whole other mode she'd never noticed. It was like finding a secret door. It was this thing called pregnancy mode, which is like an overtly gamified way to talk about, like, conceiving a child. So I flipped on pregnancy mode, and it was like,

Are you sure you want to activate pregnancy mode? As if I had all of this like reproductive control that like right in my hand, and I was like, yes, I'm sure I want to activate it. And then the entire interface changed from this like girl power diary to an otherworldly orb floating in the center of the screen with like a couple of cells in the middle. And that was the representation of my pregnancy at that moment. Amanda says the image on the app was janky and weird at first, just a clump of cells.

But then the cells multiplied, they turned into a shrimp-like thing, then arms and legs appeared. Gradually the image became something that looked human. If this is a story about information and the strange ways information can make you feel, at this point, she said she was developing surprisingly strong, warm, maternal feelings towards this image on her phone, dreamed up by some software company somewhere. Would you show this image to other people? Was it just private to you? I showed it to my husband once or twice,

but I felt pretty stupid about it. Like, I knew once I got out of my, you know, intimate relationship with the app and exposed it to the light of real human relationships, I was like, this looks stupid. I feel crazy for, like, showing, you know, as if it were like an ultrasound image of this, but I did show it to my husband, and at one point, you could swipe forward through the weeks, and we swiped forward to like 40 weeks, just like laying in bed together and watching it.

And it was, like, pretty awesome. It felt great. Those first two trimesters for Amanda had the normal ups and downs and expectant mother faces. She was preparing for something very ancient, the arrival of her child, using something very modern. Amanda would scroll through subredits for moms, where people offered advice or judgment or often both. As she read, she found herself imagining all sorts of grim nightmare outcomes for her pregnancy. She'd picture these possible tragedies and wonder, had she already made the mistake that would set her on a path towards one of them? Anything that I thought I had maybe done imperfectly during pregnancy, like take a bath that was too hot, just like forgetting that that was like something that could harm a fetus.

I don't know if like I have obsessive compulsive disorder, but I had this very obsessive relationship during pregnancy with the internet of needing to like close. the loop of the fear by doing a lot of searching, even when there's no real answer to any of those questions. Right, but you feel like if you have more information, if you can basically turn your brain to a final destination movie, somehow that's like an inoculation, or at least you'll understand. And if you understand every single bad thing that could happen, then it's like it already happened and you're kind of okay with it. Or like something, whatever that behavior is, whatever sort of category of personality or mental health that goes under, I know it. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. You know, pregnancy is rough and a lot of things can happen in a pregnancy. But all of these apps are like, you're like disciplinary programs for creating optimal humans. Pregnancy itself, I think, is very much suited to this online gamification where it's like, level one, he feels very sick. Level two, like the baby's getting bigger. Level three, like ends in the birth. and I was like interested in where I was and what fears I could like put aside. So for Amanda, she and her internet were now in this loop they maintained together.

She'd check in out of curiosity, out of anxiety. She'd get information, which often fed her anxiety. Her anxiety would make her want more information. For two trimesters, that's how the loop ran. It was in the third trimester, level three, that things changed. What's the first piece of information you get that something might be unusual about your pregnancy? I was 29 weeks pregnant, and I went in for an ultrasound that was checking on the health of my placenta. Because I had a little marker in my blood, and because I was 35, it triggers this protocol to check and make sure that you're not developing preeclampsia, which is a condition with the placenta.

And I remember lying there with my mask on because this was 2020. And the technician was talking with me. And they have like their stock, small talk that they say. Like, have you picked a name? Do you know if it's a boy or girl? Like, do you want to know? And then she like stopped small talking with me. And I realized that the exam was lasting a really long time.

And she was like examining things that I knew were not the placenta. And she told me that the baby's tongue. was sticking out. And I was like, that's so cute. You know, like, obviously that's so adorable. And I realized later that, like, if the tongue is sticking out persistently on an ultrasound, that is unusual. The technician left the room to communicate to the doctor what she'd seen. As Amanda sat alone in one room, in the other, the technician was receiving more instructions remotely from the doctor. There was a new loop where the technician would come in, take more pictures, leave, talk to the doctor, return.

And eventually, when she was done, the doctor came in, and he told me that the tongue protrusion was unusual, and that my baby might have something called Beckwith-Weedman syndrome, which is a rare genetic disorder. It's an overgrowth disorder. And at the time, like, I had never heard that combination of words before, but I knew the word syndrome, and I was like, that is not a good. like a syndrome isn't a good word. And when you say an overgrowth disorder, what does that mean? It causes certain parts of the body to grow faster than others. So in some kids, they're born with a really large tongue.

Others have enlarged intestinal organs or their entire body is larger or half of their body is growing faster than the other. So they have like a leg length discrepancy. And certain pediatric cancer. cancers can occur so certain tumors can grow in young children. It was a jarring thing to hear. I didn't know anything about the syndrome. All I knew was that he could see something in my baby that indicated that something was wrong.

Yeah. And I knew that I had always known that this was going to happen because I had been so obsessively thinking about it. Like I had been thinking about it for such a long time, like something happening, something happening and just like spending so much time alleviating my fears about it. And it almost felt like I was being punished for thinking

like I could win pregnancy that I could do it okay. And I felt like I was being smited or something for having this cavalier approach. Are you religious? No.

Like I've never I've never believed in anything except for like Santa Claus. But it's like you're describing sort of like, and I'm just saying this because I relate. You're describing in a moment of distress, very religious feelings. Like you're being punished, you're being smited. Had you had the correct thoughts in the right order, there's some part of your brain that's insisting,

you could have behaved in such a way that God, the universe, something would have acted differently. Yeah. I had this weird feeling early in pregnancy that was new to me, which was I felt superstitious about the pregnancy, where a few weeks into my pregnancy, I considered deleting flow because I found it kind of obnoxious. The amount of updates it was giving me. And so I thought about deleting it and downloading a different pregnancy tracker. but I felt superstitious about it like I felt superstitious about deleting my baby.

The fascinating thing about a moment of crisis is that sometimes beliefs you hold that you're not even aware of are suddenly revealed to you. Amanda learned that she developed a relationship with this app that was superstitious. She's not a religious person, but she'd imbued it with some kind of spiritual power.

I bet more people have done this than have allowed themselves to realize it. there's some human desire to worship, to believe, to look for special amulets that give us power over the things we can't control. And in a world where fewer and fewer people are religious, or think of themselves as religious, maybe more of us, without realizing it, have magical thoughts about stranger things, like our phones, like information. Ancient Greeks went to oracles, we go to Reddit. We look something up, hoping we'll get a glimpse of our fate so that maybe we can avoid it. I had this feeling as the technician was working

that if I had my phone with me, I could Google the things that she was looking at. I could Google tongue stuck out seven months, ultrasound, and I could figure out what was going on and either like that would fix it or at least I would be in control of the situation. There wouldn't be some expert looking into my body who knew way more about it what was going on in there than I did.

And I wanted my phone so badly at that moment. God, I don't understand the source of that delusion, but I relate to it so deeply. You're like, give me my magical stone that gives me answer. I know, exactly, right? Yeah. And then the doctor, after he told me that he suspected this rare condition, he said, don't Google it. He wrote it down for me on a piece of paper because I couldn't remember the words that he had said. And he said, don't Google it.

And, like, I did immediately, obviously. And so then you just find a bunch of nightmare fuel, I'm assuming? So I found a list of potential symptoms that babies can have if they're born with BWS. And that I feel like so ashamed when I talk about this. Because it was just this what seemingly, like, random grab bag of, like, abnormalities. And so it really freaked me out. Sorry, can I ask, like, when you describe that, you feel ashamed, what about that reaction now do you feel ashamed of? Because my son, when he was born, had some of those markers.

And he's like, you know, he's like the most beautiful person in the world to me. And also, I hate any inkling of thinking that anyone is judging him or has like stigmatized him for looking different. And knowing that I did that before anyone else, like his mother, is, you know, it's one of those experiences where at the time I felt like I was Googling to get control and control would help me be good mother. And now I know that like, a good mother, I don't even like that term. Like, in order to be like a good parent to him, I had to meet him

and not try to manage who he was going to be or what people would think about him, what I would think about him. After a short break, we'll continue Amanda's story. This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Instacart. Instacart is more than a grocery technology platform. It's really about giving you back time and making everyday tasks feel a whole lot easier.

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Go see the record for yourself at vanguard.com slash impact. That's vanguard.com slash impact. All investing is subject to risk, Vanguard Marketing Corporation distributor. You should tell the people who we are and what our new show is. I'm Robert Smith, and this is Jacob Goldstein. We used to host a show called Planet Money. And now we're back making this new podcast about the best ideas and people and businesses in history. And some of the worst people, horrible ideas and destructive companies in the history of business. We struggled to come up with a name, decided to call it, business history.

You know why? Why? Does this show about the history of business? Available everywhere. You get it. Welcome back to the show. When we left the story, Amanda had met with a doctor who had told her that her sister. might have a genetic disorder.

But that would take testing to know for sure. You leave the office, they hand you the piece of paper and say, don't Google it, which that is like a Greek myth. Like, I think every single human being who's ever been alive, Google's it. Yeah. So you Google it and you have like a horrible time. But so what happens next medically? Like they're like you're going to do genetic testing?

Like what's the next step? Yeah. Yeah, so they scheduled me for an amniocentesis the next day. I had not had one of those earlier in pregnancy. How does that work? They're taking amniotic fluid? Yeah, they use a really, really big, like, comically large needle, and they stick it in your enormous stomach.

And they extract a bunch of, like, yellowish fluid out of your body, and there are, like, sloth-off cells from your baby skin. that are like in that soup. Oh, wow. I think they're like peeing and pooping, essentially like in some way in there and then drinking it. I don't actually know what happens there, but their cells are in there somehow.

And then they can go and like isolate the cells and grow them so that they can get more of them so that they can test for more things. So I eventually, this was like 12 hours later, they put me in touch with a genetic counselor who worked for LabCorp. which I didn't like. I would love to just talk to you for three hours about lab quab.

Yeah, I mean, I thought it was odd that this person who is advising me what tests to get worked for the testing company that made money off of giving people tests. I was like, is she telling me to get way more tests than I need to? And it was, this was really tough. It was tough to decide which tests to get because I was 29 weeks pregnant. And so I wanted the information as soon as possible. But the more tests that you choose, the longer you have to wait because they have to grow more cells to test for more things. Oh, wow.

Yeah. Amanda says the doctor suggested another kind of genetic test called Whole Exome sequencing. This test would be able to detect all sorts of different possible genetic mutations or disorders. Amanda decided against whole exome sequencing. She didn't want to know about outcomes she wouldn't be able to prevent or about scary-sounding probabilities that might worry her but never actually show up for her child. She asked instead for more limited testing from the doctor.

And he was disappointed. He was disappointed that we didn't do it. And he said, this is going to be the standard for genetic testing soon, that people are going to do this. And I was like, okay, I don't care. I don't want it. How do you feel, like, not to, like, I don't mean to leave your story to ask you this. broader question, but, like, when he said this is going to be the standard of genetic testing,

like, how did you feel about that? As a person who, besides being a person going through this experience, is a person who thinks about digital information, the Internet, these weird prophecies were being given sometimes against her will or without us totally understanding what it would mean to understand And then, like, what did you think when he said that? I think I had this sense that these decisions were being made without the input of, like, the people who they would affect the most. And I'm sure that's not strictly true.

Yeah. But I was so naive to, like, what genetic testing can and can't test for. like what it means when something is flagged as high risk or positive or negative. And it was like I had to make these incredibly, like, ethically and morally charged decisions through this technology that I did not understand that I had no control over, and it would only affect my child's future. It was like the worst experience of my life at that time. I feel like I've since had harder experiences,

but I was more ready to face those. For Amanda, what was harder than the decision about which tests to take was what happened afterwards, which is that after the amniocentesis cells were sent off for testing to LabCorp, Amanda then would end up waiting four weeks for the test results. Four weeks in which she just had to find a way to live with a question that felt beyond life or death.

One thing she did in those weeks of waiting was she sought out a second opinion. She went to another doctor to have her look at the ultrasound. But instead of clearing her, the doctor detected an additional possible problem. On the scan, her baby's brain looked smoother than it should, which could suggest possibly that her baby's brain was failing to properly develop. As Amanda's worry and her superstition deep end, it was starting to seem to her that her thoughts and fears were actually affecting what was happening.

I felt even more that I was living in some kind of supernatural reality where I was like, okay, you were punished with a genetic condition and you didn't like it. So like we're going to give you something worse. Like we're going to get you something like this is much more like catastrophic than that. Because someone saw something or thought they saw something on an ultrasound of a body that's inside my body. I spent that week researching abortion providers

who provide abortions in the third trimester, how I could fly there, get it done and recover there in a place that is not New York and like during a pandemic whether it would even be possible to do this, whether I would have to, like I

was like I imagine like killing myself. I was like, if I kill myself, then that is like a way out of this scenario. I'm so sorry. It, like, I feel like I should have, like, more empathy for the person than I was at that time. You have a hard time accessing empathy for that person? No, but I think that she was particularly freaked out because, like she didn't even think about the possibility of, like, her child, like, having any disability at all.

Like, I was, like, starting from, like, zero, you know, in terms of, like, even considering that could happen. Amanda identifies the week she spent waiting to get an MRI as the darkest part of all of this. The only time where she found herself thinking about suicide or considering an abortion, when she finally was able to get an MRI, And the doctor got a better look at her baby's brain. The doctor told her that the news was actually good. He said that the brain looked perfectly normal and that he couldn't see any structural differences in it at all. And an MRI is just better at looking at a brain than an ultrasound is.

God. It was like the happiest moment of my life. And a few weeks later, we got the test back for Beckwith-Wedeman syndrome, and it was positive. And I was so happy then, too. Because, like, at the beginning of this four weeks, I couldn't have imagined this. But at the end, having a diagnosis is, like, such a gift. We could actually learn how to prepare for, like, our real child who was coming. Yeah.

And so I went from feeling like I had been, like, cursed and like pushed down these levels of curse to redeemed in some way, even though I had done nothing. I did nothing. Nothing about my child changed. Nothing about me changed. But this entire journey was like as if I were like moving between, I don't know, realms. Different versions of your life.

Yeah, I don't know. But nothing changed. This is one of the stranger truths for anybody who, for any reason, waits for the results of a genetic test. The fantasies you can have about different possible outcomes feel so real and are so profoundly emotionally absorbing that it's like your mind splits into different realities. The positive test result, the negative test result, as you read post after post online from people who were in your shoes, trying to find yourself, trying to guess your own future. It's an intense, peculiar kind of reality to live in. These experiences, which many more people are having these days, are relatively new. We've had some rudimentary genetic testing since the 1950s,

but the idea that it's something that many expectant parents routinely do, that's something that changed in the past decade, as our ability to test for and sometimes treat genetic disorders has rapidly expanded. There's an amazing book about this called Testing the Woman, Testing the Fetus, the social impact of amniocentesis in America. The sociologist named Raina Rap wrote the book, and she started thinking about it in 1983 when she had an amniocentesis,

it tested positive for Down syndrome. She had an abortion, and she started thinking about the effects of this process and this choice on herself, on her peers, and just on pregnancy, in general. And she spent 15 years studying people who undergo amniocentesis with like a variety of

results. And she asked them why they had decided to take it or why they had decided not to take it, their reactions to the results and then how they made a decision about what to do. And one of the main themes of her book is that these medical technologies are being offered to the general public much earlier and at a much more advanced rate than like our actual public conversation about like the impacts of these choices, that these choices will even be offered to you, that it will be something that you will like need to decide. And the thing that struck me when a similar sort of thing happened in my pregnancy was like, I'm being asked to make this private decision.

It's going to affect one potential person like my son. But it also has these really wide-ranging social effects, and I have never had a conversation with any person about this experience. Yes. Can I share something with you? So I was trying, when I first started trying to read your book, I happen to be in this very weird episode in my life where a family member had reached out a bunch of times

and suggested I get tested for a genetic mutation and I'd kind of ignored it and then they'd called me and really been like, hey, this could be pretty bad and could show up in your life pretty soon if it expresses itself so you have to go. And I don't know, every other time it had been like a marginal hypothetical in my mind and then it had really landed

as like that feeling of like a maybe. And so I'd gone and got tested kind of impulsively. And then LabCorp. Which sounds like it's like a villain's company. And like one of the like Robocop movies or like a Terminator movie. And like I walked into like a one medical one day before work. And you know, they sent the stuff to LabCorp like half an hour. Like it was that convenient in a way that now I'm not sure it should have been.

And this was just test results for me, like not for my base. So this is all a million times easier. But it was just like four weeks where my life tunneled. The thing that really bothered me wasn't that this thing that could happen could shorten my life or shorten the quality of my life. It was to think that I was going to get an answer now. And if the answer was yes, the time I had left, I was just going to be thinking about something that I couldn't control. I had this conversation with my therapist where he was like, well, you know, you know how to live. And if you have 15 good years, you live 15 really good years.

And in my head, I was like, that's a really nice thing for you to say. That's just not true. Like, I will spend 14 of those years Googling symptoms on Reddit. And then, like, as my capacity to form sentences drifts away, maybe I'll stop. I don't know. I have not earned an opinion on how widespread genetic testing should be. But I've earned an experience where I thought that was a really awful way to spend four weeks in my life that I know my life is finite. I know that I won't get those four weeks back.

All the things that really matter and are important, like the well-being of the people in my family and my job and my friends all went to the background. And I lived in this weird prophecy. And it was funny, it was the first time that the stupid Oedipus story ever made sense to me. So it was been like, yeah, I don't think I'm going to kill my dad or have sex with my mom.

But to me, I was just like, oh, you should be wary about the oracles. Because, like, how useful is it to know a fate you can't change, really? Like, what does it do to make your life for your life? more meaningful. And if that dates a probability, like, I don't know how to sit with a maybe. I really don't. And maybe other people are wiser than me. But like, I wish someone had had a conversation with me to be like, you really need to think about this before you ask this question, because it's really going to be hard to live with. Yeah. I remember after I had the amniocentesis, the receptionist gave me a package that had my baby cells in it and told me to go to FedEx. And I was like, I yelled at her.

I was like, what do you mean? Nobody had ever asked, and my husband was like, you can't, you know, the receptionist. And I was like, sorry. But what are you talking about? Like, I'm going to send it like it's just a care package, you know? Yes. Like, it's just some physical object. It felt so wrong for it to just be such a normal object, just a quotidian, like, anything else in the mail.

And I was like, it's not a physical thing. It's a philosophical thing that I'm sending. or like it's a metaphysical thing that I'm sending, an ethical question that I'm sending. Yes. Not a piece of real matter. I don't know. And then after that happened,

I got into this Googling wormhole about what happens to the samples after. Like they go into this truck. There's someone who drives the truck whose job is just to drive the sample truck. And you can watch a video online of all the robots analyzing the stuff. I totally went down my version of this rabbit. Yeah. I was like, I need to know the chain of custody for some reason. That's going to happen.

No, I was in this thing with, oh, my God. I mean, I don't want to say that any part of your experience marks you as lucky. That's a really hard experience. But I will say you were there before chat GPT. And the conversations you can force chat QBT to have with you about methylation. Oh, no, yeah. That's a word that I learned. during my pregnancy too.

I was like, why should I know this word? Like, it's wrong for me as an English major to know what this word means, but I do know. Yeah. What's strange about the way I was behaving, the way, to some degree, Amanda Hess was behaving, is that we actually already had access to very good information,

the information we could get from actual doctors. To seek out second, third, infinite opinions online from idiots, from chatbubes, it means you're closing your ears to a doctor and opening it to some people who, frankly, often have no idea what they're talking about. We know this when we're reading about things we already understand. We forget it when we're confused and desperate. What is that, that compulsion to search?

What makes us do it? Where do we think we're going exactly? I think I realized that I was obsessed with this idea that, like, the internet provided this information cocoon that when I left it, I would have gained my powers in order to deal with the situation. Whereas any information that was outside of that, like that a doctor knew, I was so afraid of the idea of not being the person in control, even though, of course, I wasn't in control. But I also, you were saying, like, is it ever good to know this stuff? And for me, ultimately, even though it was like a really

terrible experience. I'm so lucky that I got this diagnosis before my son was born because it meant that there could be doctors waiting for him at the hospital where I gave birth who were ready with a protocol to treat him. I think I have to believe that it was so, so helpful. So that it's all worth it in some way. I needed something to resolve this like out of body experience that I had. But also, right before my son was born, I was in labor for a long time and I was pushing and he didn't come out and eventually my doctor suggested a C-section and I was like, sure. And then I started crying. And I think the people around me very used to women who, like, get really sad about having to have a C-section who don't, or who are afraid of it, don't want to have it. And I let them

think that's what was happening. But what was really happening was like, I was afraid to meet my baby. I was afraid about who he was going to be and what he was going to look like. And then immediately, when they, like, cut him out, they bundled him up or whatever. and like passed him to my husband. And he said, he's so cute. He's so cute. And he like brought him to me and he was so cute. Like he's a baby.

He's like a human baby. He's cute, you know? And I think it was only at that moment that I realized like how dehumanized all of the information had been. It was just taken out of this context of like a real life. and suddenly like he was alive. He was like there. And he was a person who has a thing. But he was my son and he was beautiful.

And the whiplash between those moments is just so it's, I never thought I would have an experience like that in my life. Amanda says these days her son is doing well. He had tongue reduction surgery at three because his tongue could have interfered with his jaw development. He's four now. He still gets tested a lot. because Beckwith-Weedman syndrome means he has an elevated risk for some cancers.

But those risks decrease over time, and so far he's okay. Amanda also worries about what this all might mean for him emotionally, to have spent so much time in the medical system at such a young age. But mainly, she just really loves her son. This person she couldn't have imagined until one day he showed up. I had one more question for you, and then I'll let you go. I thought your book was really tremendous. One of the things I noticed was how many times the word information recurs,

where you talk about, like, I was seeking information, I was trying to get more information, there's too much information. It's not a chorus. It's like a beat in the book, like a musical beat. And then towards the end of the book, like the word information starts to disappear a little bit, or does it seem to, and you started to talk about knowledge. And I wondered if that's something you consciously think about, like about acquiring information versus acquiring knowledge

and if there's things feel different. Yeah, or experience. I realize now that there was really ultimately nothing that I could do to like prepare to meet my son that was more crucial than like actually just meeting him, you know? And my quest for information, which is really just like my need to control the situation, once your kid is born and like especially once they become a toddler, I can't control my child in any way. Like, I wish I could control him more. But that fantasy is so gone. Like, he's just so real.

He's, like, a really complex person. I never could have genetically constructed, like, a human who is as great as my son. Like, if I had, like, used this, like, advanced embryo selection technology to be, like, I want him to have a really good balance or whatever. Like, my imagination of him is so meager. compared to his reality. It would be impossible for me to build him. Amanda, thank you.

Thank you so much. Amanda Hess. Her memoir is called Second Life, having a child in the digital age. I highly recommend it, and if you want to pick up a copy, there will be a link in our show notes. This episode of Search Engine

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