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in the dark minimal lighting, to almost hang above rather than behind the alter as if floating in an outdoor sky. Clouds, they were called. Johnny was making clouds. Some clouds. Imagine some romantic reclined on a grassy bank taking these in. Dr. Long prompted, "Johnny, show the one with the six foot picket spiked through the pelvis." There was a bit of group air sucking as the thunderhead image, suitable for armageddon, appeared. "Took us six hours just to clean the mud out of that mess. Why he didn't bleed out is ..." he trailed off in a shrugged gesture. Anyway, our mister 98 tossed emboli. We couldn't fully anticoagulate him with all the open wounds and debridements. Jack Brenner fished an umbrella into his lower cava, so we got through that, but the swelling is, well, formidable." The next x-ray was a mish-mosh of flexible snake like metal reconstruction plates going every which way, like a road map, all over the pelvis. Screws were pointing everywhere. Somebody in the gallery mused, "Iz'at the record?" He was told no, the fellow treated at Mercy six years ago still safely held the record for the most screws in the pelvis. That this injured fellow had a long smoking history and that the scaffold broke under his huge weight in excess of 300 pounds made pulmonary embolism nearly inevitable but it was nevertheless fodder for discussion. While some were wondering aloud what a 300 pound man was doing on a scaffold, the could you have's and shouldn't you ought to have's were being deflected to the presenter by the floor. Did they allow for the dialysis effects of six hours of high pressure pulsed lavage cleansing? They had. A renal specialist was in the O.R. the last four hours keeping the big man's body fluids balanced. Attending medical specialists in the gallery had comments on advisability, criteria and timing of thrombolytics. They all agreed that it was a tough