My friend found a new doctor for her endometrial cancer and had a complete hysterectomy two weeks ago (can you believe it’s been so long since I’ve written?!) and is recovering quite well. Faster than the doctor expected. Ladies, if you ever have problems please see the doctor ASAP. Catch it early and it’s easier to deal with!
Last week was interesting. I took my friend to a gynecological oncologist for an initial visit for her newly diagnosed endometrial cancer. He (the doctor) decided that my friend could wait a month to discuss surgery on the cancer so she could lose ‘50 pounds or so’. 50 pounds??? IN A MONTH? C’mon, doc! Seriously, is that even realistic? Or SAFE???
I do realize surgery is supposed to be harder on someone who weighs more, but I just think his goal is unrealistic. He asked her if she’d ever considered bariatric surgery. Huh? He won’t do the surgery to get rid of cancer but he wants her to have bariatric surgery?
He then proceeds to tell her all about her cancer and how horrible it could be and how it could be a ticking time bomb and could even be spread all over by now. But she must wait a month to see if she can lose 50 pounds before he will even consider doing anything for her.
As much as this all irritated me, I think what irritated me most was the fact he talked down to her. He used huge medical terms without explaining them and spoke quickly so as not to be interrupted. When she actually had the gall to stop him to ask about something, he was exceptionally put out.
She’s checking into second opinions and I’ll most likely be taking her to a new doctor soon. We’re an hour from the closest gynecological oncologists so we have to commit an entire afternoon or morning to this. If she can’t get someone to listen to her there we may have to make the three hour drive to Kansas City or a two hour drive to Tulsa.
I don’t know, this has been a frustrating experience for me and I know it was for my friend. She’s a widowed mom of three and has no insurance. She’s waiting on emergency medicaid, but that can take up to 90 days and she might be denied. Right now friends and acquaintances are working on ways to raise money to get her to doctor visits in the mean time.
This is my rant, and my crusade, to get health care for my friend so she can get this taken care of and go back to doing what she needs to do: take care of her family.
Oh, and by the way, just like breast cancer has pink, uterine cancers have peach, so when you wear peach, say a prayer for my friend.
Wow, I am way behind on email and rss reading but I took a peek at Marilyn Pappano’s blog tonight and found she’d written a glowing review about me. I have to tell you, Marilyn is one of the nicest people I’ve had the privilege to work with and it’s really cool to have such a nice review from her. Thanks, Marilyn, the feeling is mutual!
Seriously. A blue dog.
I have a friend, we’ll call her Tracy (mostly because that’s her name), who has a wicked sense of humor. Her groomer dyed her Bichon Frise blue today and she brought him over for a photo shoot.
The dye is just food coloring and will wash out by next week so it didn’t hurt his skin and unless the thing about dogs being color blind is false, he’s not traumatized.
We may have more pics of him later. She’s thinking of coloring him green for St. Patrick’s Day so maybe I’ll get to do some green puppy photos. 
Well, I’m off to do valentine pics at our local YMCA. It’s a fundraiser for my kids’ gymnastics team. I was supposed to take pictures on Monday and Tuesday, but we had a little ice storm (as compared to the big ice storm in December) and I decided not many folks would be out and about so I canceled. Today we’ll spend all day there, taking pictures and editing them so we can get them processed over night and back tomorrow for Valentine’s day.
Okay, I promised a freebie photo template so here it is!
This is a layered psd file created in Photoshop PS3. I can’t promise it will work in any other version of Photoshop or any other software application. All you have to do is drag your photo onto a new layer above the black layer and make a clipping mask. I have directions included in the zip file. Please don’t download this to redistribute and claim as your own. If you’re a photographer you may use it to insert your clients photos in. Enjoy!
Just go to the DOWNLOADS page to grab it!
PS You do have to be logged in to download this…sorry, but it keeps bots from just snagging it. As soon as you’re logged in you’ll see the download link.
As I reflect over the last few months, I’ve discovered that as much as I love web design, marketing and writing–I love photography, too! I’ve been honing and practicing my photography skills and I’ve discovered that I’m becoming good at it. So good that people are starting to request my services as a photographer. I hope that doesn’t sound conceited, it just amazes me that friends are starting to treat me like a professional.
I’m slowly adding photography into my design work and I’m also adding some photography templates in, too. I’ll be posting some freebies later and I’ll have some for sale soon, too.
Hang on for the ride as The TechnoDiva opens another door! (and hopefully I’ll blog more too!)
We’ve all had them… THOSE weeks. The weeks where you’re flying twelve different directions doing everything for everyone when suddenly you realize it’s Friday and nothing has really been accomplished.
It’s been that kind of week for me. I’ve been busy every waking moment yet I’ve accomplished little. One of the things I thought I’d accomplished was updating the Romance Writers Ink site. This morning I received an email from a board member telling me that the page I updated yesterday was now missing.
Somehow in the process of saving the page I deleted every bit of content. I actually believe the error was due, in part or whole, to the Spaw WYSIWYG editor I’d installed in our Joomla content management system. I’ve had it happen before (and usually I double-check things before signing off on them!), but in my haste to get the update made and make a meeting half an hour later I didn’t check to make sure everything was published correctly.
My mistake.
This morning I had to recreate the whole page. (sigh)
Thanks to the fact that Google caches sites, I was able to copy and paste most of the text from the original page. I had to re-do the edits I made yesterday, but it sure beat having to rewrite the whole page!
The quick and dirty way to rescue a lost page is to do a search for your site on Google, then click the cached link.
Copy and paste your lost info and, violà! You’ve saved yourself a lot of work.
Still lovin’ the Google!
The better your html code is the easier it will be for any combination of browser and operating system to read your site. This means someone on a Mac using Safari can see your site as well as someone running Windows and Internet Explorer (or FireFox which is what I use!).
Good code also means faster download times. If you take the short amount of code I referred to in my last post and converted it into the 24 pages of junk code (also from last time!) which do you think would download into site visitor’s browsers faster? Hmm….I wonder.
Of course, these are the overly simplified reasons you want good code…but they ARE good reasons!
I know I promised a new series on blogging and I will start it soon, but I wanted to address a few things this week. You see, I’m speaking this weekend at Conestoga 2007 on Saturday so I want to give folks a bit of an appetizer and address some important issues in web design, too.
When working on your website it’s important to realize that the web is not print. It is not read the same way, it cannot be created the same way, it is not looked at the same way.
As an author one of your most important tools is probably a word processor of some sort. Microsoft Word, WordPerfect, OpenOffice are just three of the plethora of word processing programs out there. While these programs are great at what they do, they are not adequate for the web.
I know, I know, you can save your stuff in html format with these programs so it should be a no-brainer, right? Not exactly. The html code that a word processing program spits out is amazing. And I don’t mean that in a good way. Word is notorious for its junk code.
Once, just for kicks, I took a page of a site that I had hard coded (I wrote the code by hand) and converted it into Word’s html. One page of hand-written code turned into 24 pages (single spaced, one inch margins) of junk.
If you’re designing your own site and don’t want to learn the nuances of html, get a good html editor. Invest in Microsoft Expression Web or Dreamweaver or another program made especially for the web. Try to avoid Microsoft Front Page. It has been discontinued (in favor of Expression Web) and it writes horrible code. We’ll talk about why good code is important next time!
