Yeah... that has to hurt, Rap:

I was talking with a friend last night who's wife's siter has a dangerous, rare health problem. As often happens in medical problems, there is a trade-off in using medicine. A drug that helps reduce the sypmtoms or even reverse the disease often has seriously detrimental side-effects. I'm not talking about hang-nail medication that causes hemmahroids... medication to attack a serious, life-threatening disease that cause serious, sometimes life-threatening side effects. Steroids are a wonder drug that have serious side-effects if used over an extended period of time. And yet, taking them for a week completely healed my hip, so I'm grateful for them. I still couldn't hit home runs to save my soul, though.

Loudness is something that is hard to escape in our society. I'm afraid that as more and more people destroy their hearing everyone will be screaming at each other in a "quiet" conversation if this keeps up.

I'd look up hemmahrhoids to get the correct spelling, but I don't find myself using the term regularly in letters. :-)

Jerry