Take a look at http://dad.ie, a great Irish blog for dads and dads to be. Not enough stuff for us guys and it makes a refreshing change. My guest post is here and I’m very proud.
The two to three week wait required after Ciara’s umbilical hernia op was up over the weekend so she was able to go swimming again. This time her little brother came along too in a very tight fitting swimming nappy, he’s got a big bum. Ciara’s swimming is coming on very well and considering how few times she’s been she seems to be a bit of a natural. Finn on the other hand, being 16 months old, wasn’t so sure – he would cry unless he was in his granddad’s arms.
Ciara was up at Crumlin Hospital last Thursday to see the dermatologist about her hair, or lack thereof. The general consensus is that the VOD – liver disease – that she had following her bone marrow transplant severely hampered her body’s ability to grow hair, apparently your liver has a lot to do with hair growth. Her diet probably isn’t helping either; it’s hard to get food into Ciara at the best of times, let alone anything nutritious! Recently she’s been allowed to start taking multi-vitamins, and as a result we have seen a boost in hair growth. The dermatologist wants us to keep an eye on it for another six months before take further steps as there as been some recent movement. After that we may be exploring Regain or some other such treatment.
It’s a tough thing for a pretty little girl not to have hair, but it doesn’t seem to bother her that much at the moment. It will get harder as the years progress, though hopefully we’ll be able to get it sorted out soon. Considering the possible outcomes of having Neuroblastoma, it’s a small price to pay.
Today Ciara was in hospital to have her umbilical hernia fixed. From birth, like her dad, Ciara had a sticky-out belly button, quite a big sticky-out belly button at that. In 2007, or The Year My Daughter Got Cancer, it got a lot worse after she had chemo related liver disease, and it REALLY stuck out. Today’s op was just a cosmetic job really, she could have lived with it and it wouldn’t have caused any problems, but we thought it would be any idea to get it sorted while she was still young. 5 years old and she’s having cosmetic surgery!
She was very good, and very brave, and hardly complained at all about having to fast from 8pm last night to 3pm this afternoon. She was in great form even in theatre while we were waiting for the consultant, and was entertaining the medical team by running round in circles with her bum hanging out of her gown. Both my kids are so amazing, they’re the ones that make me realise what’s important in life, so when I came home to find an hilarious pension statement, I just laughed it off. I’m only young, and throwing thousands of quid down the toilet by putting it in a pension fund is part of life’s rich tapestry. Here’s amazing kid number-one just a few moments before going under.
When Ciara was in hospital she had a tube going into her chest called a Hickman Catheter (or ‘Freddie’) for administering chemo. You couldn’t get this wet whatever you do and so baths involved large amounts of cling film and swimming was out of the question. She had the catheter removed last year but we’d been reluctant to take her to the local pool because it was grim to say the least. This week Athy opened the doors to its new pool and Ciara and I went along today. Lovely facility, all new and clean and lovely. Ciara had a whale of a time so we’ll be going every week now it seems.
This afternoon I took time out to go and take a few shots of some ruins and an abandoned farmyard near us. I had in mind experimenting with a process called High Dynamic Range imaging, or HDR. The idea of HDR is to have a photo where you have strong detail in the shadows as well as detail in bright areas like the sky. This is normally impossible with a single photo but can be pulled off with HDR. It involves taking multiple, identically composed shots but at different exposures, normally using auto-bracketing if your camera can do it. You then combine these images using a little bit of software called Photomatix to create the image. Give it a bit of a tweak an your done. It can be done in Photoshop without the extra software but you would have to be autistic to get it right.
I think the images are a bit unnatural looking but I was pushing the envelope a bit in post processing to get an idea of what I can do, including doing things like black and white masking for the sky and burning in the grass etc. I’ll return to subtely another day. Click on the picture to see other HDR images I’ve created today.
