Illness, and the art of photo restoration

So my dad had major surgery yesterday - he had a blockage in his colon and abcesses, amongst other things. It was a last-minute deal and he was doing ok, but in ICU for the time being. They had to remove part of his colon and perform an ostomy, which I guess he'll have for quite a while. Not fun I'm sure

Anyway today I guess his oxygen levels were bad and he wasn't breathing that great - a lot of coughing, which just isn't good when you have a huge abdominal incision - so they put him on a ventilator. Anyway I went up there to visit and my mother was there of course, and seeing someone on a ventilator just isn't fun, because obviously they have a tube shoved down their windpipe and another down into their stomach, and they have to be totally sedated. We learned in EMT class that you can't intubate a person who is conscious, because of course having something stuck down your throat like that would cause instant panic and vomiting. So anyway, my dad was sedated but kept coming to just a little bit, so of course he would sort of jerk around, and his hands were tied down (because it would be an obvious reaction to pull the tube out if you woke up) so it just wasn't fun to watch. Anyway, I guess he's doing much better on the ventilator, or was when I left, and I told my mother she needed to leave too, because she seemed rather freaked out every time he moved.

So anyway, I guess he's on the ventilator for at least a couple days, until he starts to heal up and his lungs clear out, and then he'll be in the hospital for a few days if all goes well. Of course he's in terrible health as it is - three heart attacks and heading into the world of dementia - so who knows. I've never had a good relationship with him - in fact, he has done a lot of things that I would like him to apologize to me and others for, but I'm not too worried about it now. I just don't want my mother to go crazy (and my sister freaks out wayyyy too much about everything, so she isn't helping matters and I told her to just calm down a bit tonight.)

And I get freaked out too - in fact, this job at the hospital has turned me into a total hypochondriac. It is very disturbing to me, when we have patients come in with chest pain, or shortness of breath, or cancer of any sort, and they are close to my age. VERY disturbing. Because now every time I have the slightest bit of pain or tingle anywhere, I get nervous, knowing that there are quite a lot of people in their thirties that get seriously ill. If the stress doesn't kill me, my own imagination will.

So I've been seriously working on trying to get a litle healthier - I'm trying to eat FRUIT, which I'm not a huge fan of, and other such nice things, and less crap. Seriously, I probably eat more sugar in a month than most people do in a year. The fact that I take vitamins is probably the only reason I don't have scurvy or rickets or some other deficiency disease.

And at work they have a really good program for employees that allows us to use all the exercise equipment in the physical therapy department - which is brand new, and the equipment is very nice. So I am going to join that, which is 25 bucks a month, deducted right from the paycheck - not bad considering the convenience of it. Sticking with it is the challenge, because I've joined three different gyms and the longest I lasted was about six months. But I intend to this time. Ah, the idiocy of new year's resolutions.

Anyway, I had to go let my mother's shih-tzu Rosie out yesterday, and I had been wanting to scan some pictures that were at her house, so I grabbed a few boxes and brought them home. Many of them are REALLY old family portraits from my mother's side, mostly from Ireland and England, and I've been working on some photo restoration.

I'm not an expert, and I tried using Adobe Photoshop, but I got nowhere. It is an insane program, and to learn it would be along the lines of learning CAD, which I also tried desperately to learn once. So I used Picasa and a couple different paint programs to work on a few of them. My favorite is the one below, which you'll see as a "before" and "after" so that I can show off my incredible amateurish skill. Seriously, I impressed myself! This photo had tears in and a little water damage but was otherwise a very clear photograph and not in too terribly bad shape. Some of the others will require more work. But my goal is to get all of these old photos scanned and fixed up, so that they can be saved from further deterioration, and also I plan to get them printed and frame them. I did a little experimental framing with the one below - I took an existing, cheap frame that had a little ocean scene in it, and replaced that scene with the photo.

So anyway, here's the picture, before, after, and in the frame. The woman in the photo is Catherine Harvey, who was my great-great aunt and my favorite relative of all. She was born in 1899 and died in 1985, so I would suspect this is a later-teen portrait of her, putting it at around 1917 or so.

So here's the BEFORE -

(click on them for larger images)