Tweeting during surgery: helpful to know every detail?

Have you ever found yourself in the waiting room while a family member is having surgery? If not, you will. It can be a long and excruciating wait. How is it going? What did they find? Is my loved one OK? As the crescendo of waiting builds,it's better--or easier--to get distracted especially if the stakes are high.

Waiting for the surgeon to emerge with the definitive word usually seems longer than it really is. And if the surgery takes longer than expected, anxiety rises. "I hope everything is all right", we say. "I wish I knew what was going on in there." One especially edgy family member once said to me, "I wish they'd send some one out every 15 minutes and give me an update." Others prefer being spared the details. Just let me know when it’s over—I can’t do anything anyway—just tell me what I have to deal with. Reassurance is always appreciated. To knwo that everything is proceeding according to plan calms us down. Especially when the surgery is major, as time rolls on, anxiety stires the imagination. In the meantime, the best strategy is figure out ways to distract yourself. Thumbing through a magazine, having a conversation or watching TV helps to keep the mind occupied while waiting in the abyss of the great "don't know". Information is power. Several hospitals are now experimenting with providing an on site surgical twittering to keep family members and friends up on the latest developments in the operating room. To tweet or not to tweet that is the question. As reported on MSNBC, 70-year-old Monna Cleary gave her permission for “hospital spokeswoman 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 cell phones or computers. Corizzo sent more than 300 tweets over more than three hours from a computer just outside the operating room's sterile field. Nearly 700 people followed them. Eight tweeted questions to Corizzo about the procedure and a Cleary family member commented on how "fascinating it was to follow the surgery.” This is all very interesting and at one level very helpful—but is this just one more example of an over-the-top talky, noisy culture? Great spiritual teachers tell us there is an appropriate place for silence and for not knowing. Provided that we are willing to enter it, silence forces us to deal with ourselves at a deeper level when we are in a situation we cannot control. Ignorance can also be holy. Not knowing can become a spiritual teacher. Only when the mind is quiet, humble and unknowing, that the heart is capable of opening up to God—the Source, the Higher Power or whatever you choose to call it. Ignorance becomes a holy thing when "not knowing" becomes can become a prod to stretch beyond the cocoon of the little self. Silence and ignorance can be significant teachers on the spiritual journey. Tweets from the operating room may help assuage anxiety, and that is a good thing. But when it comes to spiritual practice it's also important to cultivate the art of waiting--especially since we live in a culture that revolves around the idol of instant gratification. Nonetheless, it's an interesting question. Would you allow your surgery to be tweeted? When you are in the family surgical waiting room would you want to know all the details? New technologies inevitably raise new ethical and spiritual quandaries.