Anyone remember what we did before the web?

I seem to have joined a club – the kind of club that you don’t want to be member of whether they’ll have you or not. (Apologies to Groucho Marx)
It’s the club for people who’ve had late miscarriages and haven’t got over it yet.
The reason I know about it is because I’ve turned once again to my old fried, the Interweb.
There are dozens of us who’ve taken the step of typing their way into chatrooms – some offering advice and others just finding somewhere else for their wails of agony. Others, like me, in the main just stand there watching and listening.
It’s easy to see life as a series of chapters: school, university, first job, first husband, motherhood, finding the Panther. Just now it feels like I’ve been jolted from my narrative’s continuum into anther chapter – After Miscarriage (or AM to friends).
Before AM I had occasionally ambled through chatrooms wondering at the obsession that had people clicking away the most intimate details at all hours to total strangers who appeared to give a damn about their particular fixation.
Did you know there were entire threads devoted to cervical mucus and that the accepted shorthand for menstrual period is AF (Auntie Flo, geddit)?
Then this week I realised I’d read every single posting by, to and for members of my special club. I now know more on the subject than I ever thought possible and some of it may even be accurate.
I even found myself registering, making up a screen name and posting too. That’s when I pulled myself back from the brink. Blimey I don’t want to be one of “them”, do I?
Of course not. But, then again, if it saves my nearest and dearest from yet another session of patient listening and delivers me something hopeful, how bad can it be?
In the consistently wise words of my dear sister: “Keep googling til you find what you want to hear, then save the page and stop looking.”