I happened to catch this story on the Today Show this morning:
Lauren Johnson is a typical 12-year-old girl – except that she can’t stop sneezing.
It is so bad that she sneezes up to 20 times a minute, or 12,000 times a day.
The non-stop sneezing began two weeks ago when Lauren from Virginia in the U.S. caught a cold.
Lauren can’t go to school and is even struggling to eat.
The only relief she gets is when she falls asleep each night. Her condition has left doctors baffled.
Cynically, my first thought was that she simply figured out how to sneeze on cue and is faking it (particularly since it doesn’t happen in her sleep), but she sold me during the interview. Not only does she look miserable, but she looks a particularly disconcerted sort of miserable that I don’t know a twelve year old would think to use.
What really stuck out in the story was all of the tasteless puns TTS was throwing out there. Pretty tacky.
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7 Responses to The Sneezing Girl
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Why do you watch the Today Show?
What’s wrong with The Today Show?
I was in a hotel eating breakfast and it was on.
Some kind of nerve damage to receptors in the nose? I doubt that it’s any deeper in the nervous system: no kinds of brain damage or neurological degeneration causes sneezing.
The receptors are probably amplifying noise into signal. Try giving her a something that causes irritation a few times. That might stop it. Or electrodes up her nose for a while.
“What’s wrong with The Today Show?”
It’s been years since I watched it, but, from memory, lots of commercials, fluff stories, forced banter between the anchors. It’s hard to most watch network or other cable news after watching Bloomberg TV, to be honest. Give it a try, if you have it, and see the difference.
Wow, am I going to be the first to mention how gorgeous this young girl is? Not to sound like a pedo, but she’s going to be a serious bargain for whoever gets in good with her, especially if he can find a way to mitigate/eliminate her sneezing problem.
She’s going to be quite the looker when she gets older. The sneezing will probably be fixed before too long (either through docs or it’ll just naturally pass). It’ll just seem to last forever.