sisters

I discovered this picture amongst the vast collection of slides Dad took over the years when we were growing up. This photo is from our trip to California in 1965. I remember this day clearly because I had lost my balance while we were wading on the beach near San Clemente. Thoroughly soaked, I had to spend the rest of the day drying off while we toured the area.

I've been playing with this image on and off for a couple years now, haunted by the juxtaposition of the two figures: my big sister, Lissa, and me. You see, there's a connection we were to share much later in life...

Lissa was treated for breast cancer in 1995, at age 40. She survived, but two years later died from leukemia - a rare result of one of the chemotherapy drugs.

In 2006 I was diagnosed with Stage 0 breast cancer, after a routine mammogram. Having a sister with breast cancer put a red flag on my chart. But I was lucky. My course of treatment was simply lots of tests, biopsy/removal and 5 years of tamoxifen. I don't even really count myself among the brave ranks of "breast cancer survivors" even though I continue to see my oncologist (who was, not coincidentally, Lissa's as well) for a yearly follow-up.

The other day I hauled this image out again, inspired by Kim's tutorial in this week's Beyond Layers post: "Dream-Like." In the end I didn't follow Kim's recipe exactly, but made my own recipe in Rad Lab and set it into an old-school snapshot frame from a site Kim shared with us last week.

This is why I do what I do with photos and Photoshop. It just might end up as a page in my scrapbook...