All moms have later-night worry sessions

My name is Erin Stewart, and I'm a cyberchondriac.

Now you may be thinking, "That's not a real thing." But I'm here to tell you that it is, and that it's very much like being a hypochondriac, only equipped with the miracle of WebMD and Google.

Admitting there's a problem is the first step to fixing it, so here's my confession: I spend a good chunk of most days looking up various skin rashes, symptoms and diseases that I'm convinced my 18-month-old daughter, Nicole, has contracted at the city park.

A good "Grey's Anatomy" episode will also send me to the Internet on a quest to determine whether Nicole has a rare form of typhoid fever found only in swamp water in African coastal climates. Has she been playing in stagnant ponds in Third World countries? No. But thanks to WebMD, I can still obsess about it from the safety of my Salt Lake home.

I first realized I had a problem when my husband read out loud my most recent Google searches. I hate to admit this, but here's what we found: rash, torso rash, fever and rash, infant fever, roseola, infant flu, splotchy rash, bumpy rash, raised rash, teething.

I am not proud of this.

But I can't help it. I'm a bit of a natural worrier anyway, but since Nicole came into my life I have become completely paranoid about diseases.

A friend gave me a card at my baby shower that said having a child is "to decide forever to have your heart go walking outside your body." I thought this was very cute at the time, but now I realize this is not an adorable, fuzzy-feeling statement.

This, my friends, is terrifying.

I am in a constant state of worry that this little piece of myself that stumbles around in front of me will become ill or hurt herself. And to make matters worse, babies can't tell us what hurts, so we are left trying to self-diagnose with unhelpful threads on Yahoo chats and horrifying pictures on the Internet.

And it doesn't help that the symptoms for the common cold are almost identical to the symptoms for leukemia.

No wonder I have my pediatrician on speed dial and am now closer with his nurse than many of my extended relatives. No wonder I've even been reduced to breaking elevator etiquette by asking a maternal looking stranger if this particular diaper rash looks infected, yeasty or abnormal in any way.