Formed of frailty

I have been salvaging my photos from Flickr which went back on its word to provide 1 Tb of free photo space and has now notified all users that their photos will be deleted in early February 2019. Rather than be coerced by Flickr into being a paid subscriber and pay them US$50 a year, I have bought more than US$200 worth of external disk space to upload my more than 175,000 photos on Flickr. I had more than 180,000 photos on Flickr at my last count.

But I cannot, as a matter of principle, pay a company money for having gone back on its word. Naturally, Flickr's greatest wish is for every user of Flickr to become a paid subscriber. By threatening to delete all their photos, Flickr is hoping to push everybody into paying them money just to save their photos. This is a vile dastardly deed that I cannot tolerate.

I have worked very hard to save all my photos and a few days ago, I succeeded in downloading all my photos and I have backed them all up in at least two external hard drives. In the process, I have discovered many interesting photos of me and my family.

Every photo tells a tale and even the ugliest photo that you probably would be too ashamed to show anyone has a story to tell of your life. This photo is an example. It was taken on 18 June 2012, more than six and a half years ago.

My father has hypertension and diabetes for a long time. A thorough physical examination revealed that I had neither. But my cardiologist was not so satisfied with my blood pressure which seemed to be extremely variable. He thought I became nervous every time the blood pressure kit was strapped on my arm and the reading became inaccurate. That's how unreliable a blood pressure test is. And there are many people who are hypertensive but their blood pressure only goes up in the middle of the night when they're asleep or when they least expect it and not when they are being tested for it. To get a most reliable reading, you have to put on the above.

It is a mobile blood pressure test kit which is strapped to your body for the next 24 hours. You can't take a bath or a shower during the entire duration, which isn't such a bad thing if you are prepared for it and your home air-conditioning is working fine. What was really torturous for me was the strap on my left arm which tightened once every 15 minutes for the next 24 hours to take my blood pressure reading. Even when you're asleep. your arm gets an almighty squeeze every 15 minutes. You may think it's nothing. It's the same feeling you get whenever your blood pressure is taken and your arm is squeezed but you have to multiply that more than a hundred times. Once every 15 minutes for 24 hours.

The next day, I was back at my cardiologist's and boy was I glad when the hateful strap was removed for good. And the results made the suffering worth while. I was found to have a consistently normal blood pressure. Except for very minor variations of one or two points, 99% of my reading was the perfect 120 by 80 even in the middle of the night when I would have thought the extreme discomfort caused by the blood pressure kit would exacerbate my blood pressure.