For tech-savvy patients, webcast video provides a look at what to expect

Nelson Sheppard is the modern American medical patient.

When doctors announced they had found a mass in the right frontal lobe of his brain, Sheppard headed to his keyboard and the Internet, where he began gathering all the information he could find on oligodendroglioma, the type of tumor physicians suspected he had.

And the day before his own surgery he returned to his laptop to watch his doctor remove a brain tumor from a 56-year-old Spring woman via a live webcast from Memorial Hermann The Woodlands.

"I think not knowing is scarier to me," he said. "I want to know as much as I possibly can figure out. It's much more comforting to me than going into this blind. I want to know everything."

For the next hour, Sheppard sat hunched over the laptop resting on an ottoman at his Humble home.

"I don't know if I'd have the strength to watch it," his mother, Amy Sheppard, said minutes before the webcast began. "Whatever makes him more comfortable. I'm just here to help him through it."

But once the surgery started on the small screen, she never left her son's side, kneeling next to his chair, glued to the entire presentation and to her son.

Throughout, she monitored his reaction to the surgery, the questions answered by the doctors and the information about brain tumors offered by two moderators sitting outside the operating room.

A Memorial Hermann spokeswoman said a little more than 1,000 viewers logged in to watch the live webcast. To date, another 2,400 viewers have watched the archived webcast.

The hospital system's first surgical webcast from the Texas Medical Center in November 2004 had 1,900 viewers watching it live. Since then, another 9,000 have watched it from the archives.

Some of the doctors featured in the webcast continued to interact with viewers after the broadcast was originally shown.

"We see this as an opportunity to educate the public and reduce anxiety," said Darin Szilagyi, director of service line marketing for Hermann Memorial. "We saw the Internet as a new opportunity to propagate our message."