Here it is St. Patrick’s Day and for the second year in a row, there’s no Guinness in the house. No Jameson, either. Not every holiday comes with drink requirements, but this one does and it feels wrong to not be able to partake. Not even a shot. This is just another one of the things that goes with being on chemo. I’ve mentioned it before, I know. If we were having corned beef for lunch today, that might help, but we’re not. Corned beef costs far too much for our budget, especially when considering how much of it we have to cook to keep the kids pleased. Five pounds is barely enough for the kids.
When cancer treatment starts, it’s easy to think, “I got this. We’ll make it through. No problem.” The longer treatment continues, though, and the side effects get worse, not better, and you miss being around your friends, and you begin to feel the weight of the treatment as an emotional burden, the more difficult it is to hold onto any kind of hope. I keep telling myself, “Maybe next year.” Maybe. Who knows what might happen over the next 365 days? There are no promises that the backside of treatment won’t leave me with lingering side effects. There are no promises that as one treatment ends another becomes necessary.
This is where the depression kicks in. Every day, there is something that you’re missing, something you want to do and can’t. Dance a jig? I never have been a dancer, but trying such a thing now would land me on my butt. Go to a burlesque show? Sorry, I can’t stay out that late. Bingo night with the other old folks? I don’t dare. They might be contagious.
At least I have coffee. The day they take that away from me, I’ll have no choice but to die.
The problem of archived digital photographs is coming to bear in a painful way. The above photo was taken with a five-megapixel Canon 5D. In 2005, it was the best in its class for digital SLRs. One of the promises of digital photography was supposed to be that we could return to them at any time and re-process them without damaging the negative. That’s proving not necessarily to be the case.
JPEG artifacts are the problem. Or maybe it is software that doesn’t accommodate how formats were written to disc 20 years ago. Whatever the issue may be, I’m finding that trying to fix the color in old images, which is a frequent necessity, is difficult. This morning, it’s the red channel that won’t cooperate. There are places where original settings can’t be changed or improved. The data can’t be overwritten.
Part of the problem may be that I no longer have the original RAW file. In theory, I shouldn’t have as many color issues working from the original. However, this photo was processed from an uncompressed TIFF file which should contain all the same digital information as the RAW file. This has me concerned that our digital files may not have the archival longevity that we had hoped.
I need some things from the store but no one currently in the house can drive, there’s not a car available if they could, and delivery isn’t an option. Maybe this time next year.