* Celebrity Bingo, always a perennial mid-winter hit at The University of Findlay, will be the featured “famous celebrity” guest bingo caller, “Pee Wee Herman,” at 7 p.m. Saturday, January 9 in the Alumni Memorial Union’s Multipurpose Room.
Admission will cost $5 at the door, but will be free for those with a valid UF I.D. The event is rated PG-13; no children under age 13 will be admitted.
Pee Wee Herman will be played by Lynn Frey, who studied and graduated from Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Clown College. He worked as a mime at Florida’s Sea World for 26 years. Tired of the mime life, Frey retired and then stared in the movie, “Just About Famous” and has been the production manager for the Sunburst Convention of Celebrity Impersonators for the last 11 years. He plays a variety of other characters, such as Howard Stern, Ed Norton, Stan Laurel and Skeeter Sweeney in the Sweeny Family Band. He also plays the penny whistle, bass, banjo, flute, fife, bagpipes, mandolin and guitar in his own “pirate band.”
* Using antibiotics alone to treat children with uncomplicated acute appendicitis is a reasonable alternative to surgery when chosen by the family. A study led by researchers at Nationwide Children’s Hospital found that three out of four children with uncomplicated appendicitis have been successfully treated with antibiotics alone at one year follow-up. Compared to urgent appendectomy, non-operative management was associated with less recovery time, lower health costs and no difference in the rate of complications at one year.
“Families who choose to treat their child’s appendicitis with antibiotics, even those who ended up with an appendectomy because the antibiotics didn’t work, have expressed that for them it was worth it to try antibiotics to avoid surgery,” said Peter C. Minneci, MD who led the study published online Dec. 16 in JAMA Surgery with Katherine J. Deans, MD. The pair are co-directors of the Center for Surgical Outcomes Research and principal investigators in the Center for Innovation in Pediatric Practice in The Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s. “These patients avoided the risks of surgery and anesthesia, and they quickly went back to their activities.”
“Surgery has long been the ‘gold standard’ of care for treating appendicitis because by removing the appendix we eliminate the chance that the appendicitis will ever come back,” said Dr. Deans. “However, early in our careers we noticed that patients with appendicitis who were placed on antibiotics overnight until their surgery the following morning felt better the next day. So, Pete and I asked ourselves: do they really need to have surgery?”
