Playing Telephone

I'd like to believe that most people are basically good.  We all have our vices and our shortcomings, to be sure, but I think most of us still posses a moral compass and a conscience.  Yet when a juicy chunk of gossip is presented to us, more often than not we'll eagerly absorb it.  What's more, chances are we'll pass it on as well.  Remember "Telephone", that funny game we used to play when we were kids?  We sat in a circle and someone whispered something to the kid next to him and that kid whispered it to the next kid and on and on until it had come full circle and back to the kid who started.  Invariably, what was said at the end bore absolutely no resemblance to the initial phrase uttered.  If it started as, "Let's go see the Mets play tomorrow," it would end up something like "Less goat seed the less pay tomorrow".  And then we'd all laugh.  But you know what? Apparently we adults have continued the tradition.  We're all aware that people gossip.  But how in blazes do things get changed and skewered and mixed up?  How do rumors with virtually no basis in reality get started?  I ask all these esoteric questions because of an interesting exchange I had a couple weeks ago with a total stranger.  I met this guy on the street and he knew me but I didn't know him.  I get that a lot; people remember me from Pirchei* or camp or the music business and I have no idea who they are.  I gave up on pretending long ago and now just say, "I'm sorry, I don't know who you are".  After this particular person identified himself, I still had no idea who he was.  He told me he had heard that I had been very sick and was glad to see that I was up and around again.  When I mentioned pneumonia, this odd, quizzical look crossed his face.  "But you didn't have pneumonia," he informed me.  I thought it was really quite nice of him to set me straight like that.  After all, I had apparently been operating under the mistaken assumption that I knew what was wrong with me all these months.  Really?  Hmmm.  And what exactly did I have, I wanted to know.  A fair question, don't you think?  "You had Guillain-Barre' Syndrome".  Well, you could have knocked me over with a feather...hopefully not from an African Grey.  Naturally I wanted to know where he had gotten his (mis)information.  He didn't know.  He had just "heard".  I was intrigued; how does something like that get started?  When he couldn't shed any light on his sources, I went home and looked up Guillian-Barre' Syndrome online.  Apparently it's a nasty little illness in which the immune system attacks the peripheral nervous system, which can lead to almost total paralysis. 
Here's a link, if you're interested:
http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/gbs/detail_gbs.htm
After reading about this truly debilitating disease, I actually almost felt fortunate, having been struggling with a mere case of C.O.P.  Don't be ridiculous, I told myself, you would have been luckier not to have been zapped with anything.  Then a week or so later I was introduced to a fellow, a contemporary of mine, who I surmised was either suffering from Alopecia, a disorder in which you lose all your hair, or was undergoing chemo.  Turned out to be the latter.  Turned out he'd been struggling with cancer for several years.  Turned out I was right after all:
I have been pretty damn lucky.

* Pirchei = Pirchei Agudath Israel, a Jewish youth organization
of which I was a leader way back in the days of my horse-and-buggy youth.