It's whorespittle.

If she'd just dye her remaining hair bright blue or flaming mauve she'd be fine. Twenty staples in her head provide the body piercings.

Now it's waiting time. Time to recover her strength. Time to start recovering her stamina. Time to let the wind blow free...oops, that's a folk song. Time to sow and a time to...no, that's the bible and Pete Seeger.

Anyway, they had her walking in the hall yesterday, using a walker and someone hanging onto a belt. Her left eye is swollen shut, but cold wash cloths and ice packs are helping. Bruising and injuries all over her body, quite literally from her right big toe to the top of the left side of her head.

Neurosurgeon: BA, Yale; MD, Loyola of Chicago; Internship, Mayo Clinic; Residentcy, Cleveland Clinic; Fellowship, Royal Melbourne Hospital in Oz (he's friends with Glinda the Good); appropriate diplomate and fellow. If you don't know US medical schools, this is all very good...the Saud family's clinic of choice is that place in Cleveland (right down the street from my graduate school!). How he and some other doctors ended up in Pocatello, Idaho is a long, sordid story of money, sex, power, broken promises, and international wheeling and dealing.

Yes, international -- the Raheem brothers run one of the finest kidney centers in the Pacific Northwest. They are from Pakistan, Muslim, and couldn't be more highly regarded in the community (by all but the maniacal very few who can't be pleased by anything).

True story: I was sitting in Sam's Gun Shop, waiting to talk with Sam (ex-Special Forces, Thai-American, PhD in civil engineering -- the gun shop is his retirement "hobby") when a Hispanic-looking man and three young men came out of the indoor-shooting-range part. The man started talking with Sam, then turned to me and said, "Where do I know you from?" I'd caught on and replied, "Your office." He said, "You should be wearing support stockings, your legs are slightly swollen" (I was wearing shorts). Yup, Ol' Doc Faheem -- in pointy-toed cowboy boots, slim cut jeans, "Western" shirt, with his two oldest sons and a nephew from NYC. Ever eeen a Pakistani-American nephrologist hitch up his gunbelt (prior to locking the pistol, etc. up)? It really, truly, looked like a scene from "High Noon," except that he was totin' an Olympic-grade shootin' iron and not the traditional "Peacemaker."

Pat laughed when I told her and wondered with others in the store might have thought.