Close calls, Near misses, and failed saves

There have been some personal crises over the last week.

My mom has been having a lot of pain for the last few weeks and was told by her doctor to have an MRI done. She has a history of cancer, and there were concerns that her spinal problems could be cancer related. She went in Thursday, and got the results today.

It looks like arthritis, which is bad enough in the spine, but it's not life threatening. She has a lot of pain and struggle ahead, but it's something that she can work with and through. It's not great news, but better news than we were afraid to get.

My niece was hit by a truck. She was in the back seat of a friend's car, and the other vehicle "T-boned" the car, striking them full in the side. Her hip was fractured in three places. My first thought was "thank god, she survived". My second thought was "Will she ever be able to have children?"

This may seem a strange thought for me, as I have no desire for children of my own, but I know very well that my instincts are not those of most people.

While in the emergency room, the nurse mentioned that they had an expert in the kinds of fracture my niece had received, and called for advice on how to proceed. The surgeon told them to have my niece on her operating table at 2 that afternoon. Tiny screws were put in place, and less than a week later, my neice took her first steps with the help of a walker. It's going to be a lot of pain and struggle ahead, but it's something that she can work with and through.

In the light of these incidents, what happened to me personally seems barely worth mentioning. Friday morning my laptop hard drive crashed, completely and totally and with very little warning. I was able to mount my drive as an external device and recover some raw radiostar files and video files I had been working on. Some of these were lost, as the machine would lock up whenever I tried to access them to copy them to a safe drive. After several hours of this, I trusted that the office backup system had gotten everything else and reinstalled the operating system. From that point, the machine wouldn't boot at all, but simply restart itself over and over again as it tried to function. The backup administrator was out of the office, and so I had to wait until this morning to find out how bad it was.

My backup client had never been activated. My fault. I had backups of many of my personal files, and my current projects were on another server, but all my photographs (and I mean ALL of them) seemed to be gone. Also, much of the novel and who knows what else. Later, bless him, he found a backup from my last laptop, which had been used as a loaner for other staff before getting rewritten. I can get everything restored, from January 2007 back. I still lost about seven months of photographs (that didn't get on Flickr) and other spreadsheets and records...

It will be a lot of work to recover, and some of what I value is lost forever, but it could have been much, much worse. What I have, I can work with and through.

and yes, I'm getting a better personal backup system.