So, did the story in Wednesday’s Journal-World about an Iowa hospital that was using Twitter to send live updates from the operating room catch anyone else’s eye?

Call us old-fashioned, but this seems like a very bad idea.

Monna Cleary, 70, gave St. Luke’s Hospital in Cedar Rapids permission to use the popular social networking site to keep her family updated on her hysterectomy and uterine prolapse surgery. Sounds a little personal, but not anymore. The messages were meant primarily for her family, but, of course, Twitter is open to anyone who wants to tune in. It seems unlikely that many other people found the tweets or were interested, but you never know.

A hospital spokeswoman used a computer just outside the operating room’s sterile field to send the reports. She might have been able to see the surgery going on, but she probably also had to depend on verbal reports from the doctors and nurses actually performing the operation. Again, call us old-fashioned, but if we were on the operating table, we would prefer to have the surgical team’s full attention.

The hospital employee reportedly sent more than 300 tweets during the three-hour surgery. This may come under the heading of “too much information.” The family certainly got a blow-by-blow account of the surgery. On the darker side, however, what if something had gone wrong during the surgery? Would that news have been delivered 140 characters at a time over Twitter for all the world to see? Maybe the tweets would simply have gone silent, leaving the family to wonder and/or panic.

Many people have spent time in a surgery waiting room waiting for news of a loved one undergoing a procedure. It can be a tense time, especially when the situation is serious and the surgery is long. Sometimes surgeons will send someone out with an update to let the family know how things are going.

More communication might be nice, but there’s a limit. For many people, tweeting from the operating room would be a huge invasion of privacy, not to mention the added expense of paying an extra person just to keep the world posted.

Just in case anyone at Lawrence Memorial Hospital is thinking about jumping on this bandwagon, we’d like to cast our vote against operating room tweets. Maybe something like this will catch on eventually, but we’re not ready for it yet.