Preserving Memories of a Loved One? 527
Posted
by
timothy
from the making-the-best-of-things dept.
from the making-the-best-of-things dept.
An anonymous reader writes "My wife is dying of metastatic (stage 4) cancer. Statistically she has between one and two years left. I have pre-teen daughters. I'm looking for innovative ideas on how to preserve memories of their mother and my wife so that years down the road we don't forget the things we all tend to forget about a person as time passes. I have copious photos and am taking as much HD video as I can without being a jerk, so images and sounds are taken care of (and backed up securely). I'm keeping a private blog of simple daily events that help me remember the things in between the hospitalizations and treatments. In this digital age what other avenues are there for preserving memories? Non-digital suggestions would be welcome, too."
Re:mod parent down (Score:0, Informative)
Who modded that a-hole Funny is also an a-hole. Burn in hell!
Best example? (Score:3, Informative)
Professor Randy Pausch's last lecture [youtube.com].
This is a very interesting and moving lecture that he essentially put together for his children when he was dying of cancer.
Re:Interview with question/answers (Score:3, Informative)
Watch the movie My Life to prepare, and for tips. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107630/ [imdb.com]
And bring kleenex, you will cry.
Re:Thoughts. (Score:4, Informative)
Great suggestion. I have one from my father. He's been gone 12 years, and one in a very long while I'll pull it out and spend some time in the past. If you do this though... be sure to store it in several layers of plastic. One won't be enough over time. 12 years and my dad's smell is just about gone.
Live it to the fullest (Score:2, Informative)
Live the moment.
To document:
Relive the time you dated. How you got together. The decisions you made together. The first car, apartment, ...
For right now:
Ask your wife. She will know what is important.
Talk about what is going to happen. Kids and parents.
The NewYorker about terminal illness:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/02/100802fa_fact_gawande?currentPage=all [newyorker.com]
I vicariously know of a family that was (Score:2, Informative)
in the reverse situation where it was he who had metastatic cancer.
Sorry for you and your family, but if there are any insights to be learned from Alex's blog, I refer you to it here: http://akaran.wordpress.com/category/the-fight/ [wordpress.com]
Re:Preserve them forever! (Score:2, Informative)
The asker mentions "backed up securely", but I have to wonder if that's onsite or off (I know from personal experience with a housefire). Your mention of Carbonite (even though it may not have been intentional) is a good one, though I tend to recommend CrashPlan by code42. I have used both, and personally feel much better about CrashPlan ( They've an added extra in that they support other backup destinations beyond the just their site). As always, do your research, and find one that suits you, but I find that I can't go wrong with the $100 a year CrashPlan family plan, unlimited backup of my households computers. Anyway, I'm sorry for your situation, and wish you the best of luck with what may come. Oh, and don't let a good offsite backup lull you into not keeping a decent onsite backup - redundancy is the name of the backup game. And forgive this post if you're already doing offsite backup.
Re:Nobody needs die of cancer any more (Score:3, Informative)
I fucking HATE people like this, trading on desperation. They remind me of the Laetrile [quackwatch.com] wackos in the 70's and 80's. It's no more legitimate than the frantically dying who spend their last few pennies going to Lourdes, [smarter.com] or giving money to "doctors of healing of the Lord." [barbaraomalley.org] My wife's mother did this when my wife was 12 and her description of the outright robbery by the assholes who run the place and the surrounding "guesthouses" [tripadvisor.com] made me nauseous.
He claims "in vivo" success, then spouts some BS anecdotal "I've seen miraculous Stage 4 cures" rubbish. You have proof of in vivo success in properly executed peer reviewed studies? Post the links or STFU. I'll bet you aren't interested in naysayers. Just the desperate with a checkbook.
He describes theoretical, early-stage research [slc-capital.com] which MAY, one day, have some use, after it is peer reviewed and proven legitimate. Right now, I see nothing but the most early suggestions of biochemical ideas, and FAR from any "unified theory" by biochemists. That's just silly.
This boob is simply suggesting a variation on the long-discredited Induced Hypoglycemic Therapy [quackwatch.com] bullshit, and doing it in a really inappropriate place. Hey Sparky, if low sugar starved cancer cells, why aren't diabetics cancer-free? BTW, neurons starved of glucose die way before any other cells. "Avoid sugar, not just HFCS." Pfffft. IHT is DANGEROUS.
Posting rubbish like you did in this thread is fucking ghoulish and if there is any real karma, you just burned a whole lot of it.
Re:Nobody needs die of cancer any more (Score:3, Informative)
Re:film (Score:1, Informative)
Have you ever actually scanned old film? I took on the project of digitizing our families massive archive of slides, and though they were relatively well taken care of, it wasn't always very pretty what age does to film (especially once you got beyond 10-20 years old). Digital with copious backups and standard (simple?) file formats are a much better bet (and much easier to take care of).
Re:Nobody needs die of cancer any more (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Nobody needs die of cancer any more (Score:5, Informative)
The orthomolecular biochemists
This word doesn't mean anything in scientific circles. "Orthomolecular" is a relatively new fad term for holistic nutrition/medicine. Examine here [orthomolecular.org] for an example.
have a unified theory of cancer and it's reversible now.
There is a unified theory of cancer, it primarily states that living things get cancer in the same way that iron rusts. It is inevitable, as a consequence of the fundamental properties of the system in question. It is not "reversible", a nonsense term in the biological context, and every specific cancer will require a different specific treatment.
Salvesterols
Google "salvesterols", 256 hits. Google "salvestrols", 35400 hits. Neither term is used in chemical/biochemical/molbio literature. The basic concept is that all "diseased cells" have specific enzymes which will convert specific plant-derived salvestrols into poisons, thus killing the bad cells. Evolutionarily, there is no way this would be maintained. The first mutant cell lacking this special enzyme would proliferate and the salvestrol would be of no use. See here [salvestrol.ca] for a representative site.
exploit the CYPB1P1 metabolic pathway; the Cytochrome P450-1 enzyme converts them to
There isn't a "CYPB1P1 pathway". CYPB1P1 is an enzyme involved in the oxidative breakdown of a variety of substrates. These enzymes are often used by animals to detoxify minor toxins from food. In the case of Aflotoxin poisoning, these enzymes are responsible for the production of potentially fatal liver damage by modifying the initially neutral compound into a potent mutagen/carcinogen/toxin [nature.com].
picotannins
The word "picotannins" doesn't exist in the chemical/biological literature, or on the web according to Google. Perhaps you meant tannings at low ("pico") levels? Tannins are plant compoinds and are not synthesized by any known animal metabolic pathways. At low levels, some tannins may have benificial effects on diet. In larger ammounts, they tend to be poisonous to animals not specialized in consuming them. Specialized animals tend to have enzymes in their saliva to bind and inactivate tannins before they can be absorved in the gut.
which selectively, in vivo and in vitro, kill only tumor cells.
Not exactly true, but since technically the chemicals you're speaking of don't exist, I suppose I can't say.
I've met end stage lung cancer patients whose cancer has been rerversed.
This is wonderful news for them and irrelevant to your claims.
I'm not interested in any nay sayers or claims of quckery. I'm just not interested.
It is good to know you've decided you don't need to learn anything about a topic to which you obviously have no expertise, before making potentially life-changing decisions based on that erroneous assumption.
Contact me directly if you need more information or sources; I can point you to (free) biochemists who can explain this much better than I can and offer guidance. It's extremely important to avoid sugar; whereas our cells use atp for energy, cancer cells use sugars directly.
Cancer cells cannot use sugar "directly" in the way you imply, nothing can actually. All cells use ATP for energy, with a minor sprinkling of GTP. Some human cell types (brain/neurons) will only accept sugar from the blood as a food source, while others (muscle/skin/etc) will also accept amino acids, cholesterol, and triglycerides from the blood to use for food. Your liver actually synthesizes sugar (glu
Backup, Backup, Backup (Score:2, Informative)
I know this has been covered by a few dozen people, but backup your backup's backup.
Having worked tech support for storage devices over the past 5 years, I've had to personally tell many people that their drive is corrupted/broken, and thus all of their family photos/baby's first steps video/wedding photos/life's work is either unrecoverable or exceedingly expensive to recover. This is the hardest part of my job, and it never gets any easier to take. I can't even imagine how it is to hear something like that.
Do NOT depend on RAID... just cause it's "Redundant" doesn't mean it's backed up. RAID only protects you against a single failure mode: a failed drive.
RAID will simply not protect you against:
power fluctuations (power loss, brownout, spikes, surges...)
bit rot, stripe and filesystem corruption,
acts of god ("crap, the basement flooded"),
acts of human ("which folder did I just delete?"),
etc, etc.
You CANNOT protect data 100%. There is ALWAYS some coincidence that can happen to mess everything up. The best you can do is have as many layers of backups as financially possible, and make sure you don't keep them all in the same place! Keep AT LEAST one offsite (different state) backup.
In short, if you can't replace something digital, then make sure you have multiple backups of it, with some in a completely different location.
Analog thoughts (Score:3, Informative)
My librarian friend's strongest argument for making analog copies on paper was the passive nature of that medium. You can tuck the paper away for 30 years and it's still good when you take it back out. Digital archives tend to require active copying from time to time. Digital files from 30-40 years ago are largely unreadable today, even if the medium is in good shape, for a number of reasons: the necessary hardware is no longer available, operating systems don't support the file system, the file format is no longer supported. In general, preserving a digital record for 30 years requires that intermediate copies be made.
However, archival work is something that can be done anytime in the next few years. Worry about other things now.
Fat Cyclist Blog (Score:2, Informative)