It all sounded so credible, news of dear old sweet Lu's demise.
First, there were her self-described symptoms, which were consistent with hookworm.
Now, hookworm was once the Scourge of the South, until some non-government people set up a non-government program to eradicate it at no expense to the taxpayers. They did a good job; hookworm was pretty much gone within only a few years.
But dear old sweet Lu lives in an isolated pocket in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina or eastern Tennessee, where few bother to go, and perhaps the hookworm there was overlooked.
Dear old sweet Lu's symptoms of laziness, apathy, lassitude, lethargy, sloth, sluggishness, languidity, inattention, whininess, helplessness, &c., &c., &c., were all consistent with hookworm.