I continued this project for one full week, until January 15th.

On that night, my Mom’s health took a very drastic change for the worse. Enough you know at least some of the details of where we were and where we are now, that I won’t go into them here. Maybe at some point in the future I will write about everything we have been through since her diagnosis with lymphoma two days before Thanksgiving through the three miracles we have seen through the process up until where we stand now: no cancer.

However, I think that story belongs as a book, but I’m not sure who would publish the story because nobody would believe it any way.

If you want a good resource for following my Mom’s health, here is a good resource. It is a CaringBridge blog set up by Carla. It isn’t updated daily, but it is updated every couple of days.

She will most likely be at Methodist Medical Center for at least another week. While the cancer is gone, her stomach is still pretty messed up. She is getting her nourishment through an IV and they will have to do a procedure so that she would be able to continue to get nourishment at home before she is dismissed. I would say that nobody knows at this time, what the treatment will ultimately be for her stomach, but while she is in the hospital, you can send her a card through this website, free and easy:

Also, Mom has shown some interest in learning about the internet and therefore I have setup an email account for her. She won’t be able to read any of your emails until she gets home from the hospital and I won’t pretend that her emails will be private (so if you send her an email just gushing about how she raised the most awesome young man, I will read it) until she grasps the concept fully, but she will read them at some point.

Here is her email address:

Now back to my own self-absorption.

I have restarted the Self-Portrait Project. I can’t say that I will continue this project, but I would like to think that we are in a good place with my Mom right now.

I may try to go back and fill in some of the backdates of blogs that I haven’t filled out over the last couple months. But I make no promises. I haven’t done a Personal Photo Project in weeks. In fact, since Mom was diagnosed, I’ve taken maybe 200 pictures total. 190 of those pictures are of Naima.

However, I have bought a new camera and I hope that it will jumpstart some creative juices. So maybe I’ll pretend like I took pictures for a Personal Photo Project back in December, when in reality, I took those pictures in March.

I also started posting pictures I take with my phone through an Instagram knockoff known as Lightbox on Twitter. I would provide you a link to see the pictures on Lightbox’s website, but you should really be on Twitter, shouldn’t you?

Here are the self-portraits I took through January 15th:

01/09/12 11:12 PM


01/10/12 11:56 PM


01/11/12 7:43 PM


01/12/12 10:14 PM


01/13/12 3:01 PM


01/14/12 11:35 AM


01/15/12 8:31 PM

We’ll see how consistently I’m able to post in the future. We’ll see…