Dumb and Dumber

Lance Armstrong finally admitted to Mother Oprah that he took drugs and had blood transfusions in order to ride his bicycle faster. (Did he really have cancer?) With all the problems we have facing us in this country, not the smallest being that our government continues to mint new pennies at a cost of more than a penny each to make, Lance pales. I find the penny thing, admittedly trivial on its face, still troubling, and if you think about it for awhile I bet you will too. We owe a huge debt to China and likely have a huge VISA bill each month, and now we are spending money just to make money, and silly little pennies to boot-- a coin so disrespected that nobody even wants them and few will stoop over to pick one up off the ground anymore, unless they are superstitious. Yet we keep churning them out; that's just Dumb.

While Lance and his drugs and his shame and his lawsuits are things we are told to care about, I don't. I do care that my sister, who I thought was dead but turned out not to be, called me from a hospital yesterday where she had been taken via ambulance because of debilitating stomach pains. This was her ninth such episode in the last few months. Each time she gets there and each time they say they don't know what's wrong. They call it "enteritis," which basically means stomach pains with no known cause, possibly parasitic in origin. They do X-rays, CAT scans, blood tests. She's there a week, with no diagnosis, then they send her home until she's back again in a few weeks. So I get online and Google "enteritis" and find out that Crohn's Disease is a possible contributor, and in five minutes I have diagnosed her, thanks to Mayo Clinic.com and WebMD, with Crohn's. I tell her to relate this information to the doc, which she does. So she calls back today and says her doctor now feels strongly that she has Crohn's Disease and prescribes specific medication to treat it. After nine episodes in three months. That's even Dumber than the pennies. (Do they have a computer at that hospital?)