Sorry I had the wrong "Regan". It was David Ragan I was reading about. Still BIG congratulations to your cousin. :o)

Thank you so much everyone! I know your KT prayers helped! Thanks to all my KT pals!

Two years ago I was using garden shears to prune a tree and I was using a lot of force to try to cut the branch, with my arms high above my head. I apparently strained something around the base of my spine, and although I had no muscle or bone pain, my skin from the waist down began tingling and then became extremely painful. The doctor said I damaged my nerves from the area of the spinal strain, downward. The hyper sensitive skin made wearing pants extremely painful, as any fabric, seams and even a breeze on my skin, caused immense pain. Thankfully, within 3 weeks it slowly started returning to normal, starting from the toes and moving up. Within a month, everything was gone, except for one patch of extremely sensitive skin about the size of a fist on the side of my left thigh. It has never gone away, but I can live with it, knowing how much worse it was before! I was told that although my nerve damage was caused by straining my spine, a virus or any injury can also cause nerve damage. I hope your sister's will resolve soon, as I know how awful it is to cope with skin that feels like it's on fire or rubbed raw.

Pickled vegetables are still vegetables, but they do often have a fair amount of salt in them. Preserved or pickled fruit is still fruit - just with additional ingredients. I think Reagan once claimed that ketchup is a vegetable, enough though tomatoes are technically fruit, as are chilies, but we eat them like vegetables. I might draw the line a beans and peas, if they are shelled, but I would consider green beans to be vegetables. If you look up "vegetable" you will get a definition like "a plant or part of a plant used as food, typically as accompaniment to meat or fish, such as a cabbage, potato, carrot, or bean." The main thing is that it belongs to the vegetable kingdom and not the animal kingdom. Here's another take on it: <A more precise definition is "any plant part consumed for food that is not a fruit or seed, but including mature fruits that are eaten as part of a main meal".> I don't include nuts and seeds as vegetables, but the green and fleshy part of a cucumber (after you remove the seeds) does has a lot of the qualities of other vegetables. Sauerkraut is unquestionably a vegetable, and that is what I eat the most of pickled, although I used to eat more kimchee. Unless you are in a seed or gardening forum, the broader definition of vegetable normally applies. I did take a botany class at university, but I leave technical definitions in the classroom. When grocery shopping, you typically find cucumbers and tomatoes with the vegetables - not with fruit. If you serve children zucchini or squash, you do not tell them to eat their fruit - or at least I would not.