Seriously, whose bright idea was it to create an area where test results can be sent to patients to view without the medical knowledge or context to properly interpret them?

I'm sure they're fine for normal people, but for people like us, they're a nightmare. We don't have the necessary education to interpret anything on those reports so those of us who are inclined to run to Google have to either fight really hard not to, or give in and then send ourselves into a hopefully-unnecessary tailspin because we don't know what we're looking at.

I had bloodwork done yesterday due to the discovery of a cyst on my pancreas two years ago, which no one at the time thought to mention to me and which I found by - yup - viewing my own CT scan results on the patient portal. Blood test results typically aren't the quickest to come back, at least not in my experience, so when I saw the e-mail notification a few minutes ago (23 hours after leaving the lab) of course my first thought was "all the results are bad."

I don't want to look at them; I want my doctor to give them to me so that I hear them from someone who knows what they're talking about. I deleted the e-mails from the lab and the patient portal to avoid temptation. I'm just not sure when I'll actually hear from my doctor; she only sees patients one day a week (Thursday) and if I don't hear from her today, I'm hoping I can avoid the urge to give in and look for myself over the weekend.