From anaesthesia to the recovery room, 70-year-old Monna Cleary's children followed her surgery - 140 characters or less at a time.

Twitter is opening doors to the sterile confines of operating rooms, paving the way for families - and anyone else for that matter - to follow a patient's progress as they go under the knife.

Most of the Cleary family chose to track the developments from a laptop computer in the hospital's waiting room. But one daughter-in-law kept tabs from work.

"It's real-time information instead of sitting and not knowing in the waiting room," said Cleary's son Joe, hours after his mother's surgery Monday at St Luke's Hospital in Cedar Rapids.

"It made the time go by," said Cleary, who was joined by a brother, two sisters and a sister-in-law at the hospital. "We all feel it was a positive experience."

His mother, who underwent a hysterectomy and uterine prolapse surgery, had given her OK for hospital spokeswoman Sarah Corizzo to post a play-by-play of the operation on Twitter, a social networking site that lets users send out snippets of information up to 140 characters long using cellphones or computers.

Corizzo sent more than 300 tweets over more than three hours from a computer just outside the operating room's sterile field. Nearly 700 people followed them.

Entering mainstream

Dian Luffman, a spokeswoman with Change:healthcare, a business that helps clients save money on procedures, said hospitals using Twitter during surgery is a sign that it's entering the mainstream, especially among the 20-and-30 somethings.

"I think hospitals are trying to build relationships," she said.

Cleary said she agreed to have her procedure posted on Twitter - but only after being educated to what tweeting was.

"I'm not much of a computer bug so I didn't know that much about it," Cleary said. "I didn't know they did that sort of thing."

During her surgery, Corizzo relayed tweets every few minutes.

Corizzo sent a message that read: "Right now doctor is cutting across some vessels & ligaments that connect the ovaries to the uterus."

Then: "Opening up the peritoneum right now," which led to a tweet questioning what the peritoneum is. Corizzo explained it is the sac that lines the abdomen.