"Most of you have read the scare-mail about the person whose kidneys were stolen while he was passed out - well here is something else for you to ponder and remember.

While that was an "urban legend" passed around from one computer to another, this one is not. It is, in fact, happening every day.

My thighs were stolen from me during the night of August 3rd a few years ago. I'm telling you folks, it was just that quick.

I went to sleep in my body at my regular time, 11;30 p.m. just after watching the news and wondering when we would succeed in blowing up the world. I woke up with someone else's thighs. The new ones had the texture of overcooked polenta. Who would have done such a cruel thing to legs that had been wholly, if imperfectly, mine for too many years to count? Whose thighs were these? And what happened to mine?

I spent the entire summer looking everywhere for them. I searched, in vain, at pools and beaches, anywhere I thought I might find female limbs exposed to the naked eye. I admit it. I became obsessed. I even had nightmares that were filled with cellulite and flesh turning to bumps in the night. Oh, yes.

Finally, hurt and angry, I resigned myself to living out the rest of my natural born days in jeans and Sheer Energy pantyhose. Then, just when I allowed my guard to be lowered, the blasted thieves struck again.

My buns were next. I knew it was the same gang as before because they took pains to match my new derriere (although badly attached at least three inches lower than the original) to the thighs they had stuck me with earlier. Now my rear end complimented my legs, lump for lump. Frantic, I prayed that long, ankle length skirts would remain in fashion for at least one more season.

Then two years ago, I think it was, I realized that my arms had been switched. One morning while fixing my hair, I watched, horrified but at the same time fascinated, as the flesh of my upper arms swung to and fro with the motion of the hairbrush. This was really getting scary. There was no doubt in my mind now that my body was being slowly replaced, cleverly and oh so fiendishly, one section at a time.

You may think it was age, but age had nothing to do with it. I always thought that age was supposed to creep up, noticed and intangible, something like maturity. NO! I was being attacked, repeatedly and without warning and it had nothing whatsoever to do with age.

During one entire spring, my attention was riveted to upper arms - female arms. I studied them from every angle, being careful not to raise mine in public or flatten them too tightly against my body.

In private, however, I held them straight out and did endless circles that would have tightened my real arms if I still owned them, but did nothing for these new "Silly-Putty" caricatures.

In the end, in deepening despair, I gave up my T-shirts. After all, what could they possibly do to me next?

That question was answered when my eyes began to remind people that they needed a new pair of Hush Puppies. My poor neck disappeared more quickly than the Thanksgiving turkey it now reminded me of.

That is why I have decided to tell my story; I cannot take on the medical profession all by myself. Women of America, you MUST wake up and smell the coffee! That isn't really "plastic" those surgeons are using. You know where they are getting those replacement parts, don't you?"