Photo Organization and Why Not To

Happy New Year.

I have a method for cleaning out the thousands of photos stored on my iPhone. Each day, I take a moment to search in Photos the current date. So today, I would search: January 13th. From there I look at all the photos taken on that date and delete out duplicates, random screen shots, pictures that felt important, but now mean nothing, etc. It is a bite-sized approach to the “what do I do with 8,236 photos?” predicament that digital media has created.

As practical as it sounds, I am still operating with thousands of photos, which feels an impossible way to imagine a collective grasp on any amount of time, but no matter- it feels like progress. Gone are the days when we had 2 childhood photo albums- the least I can do is make sure that in 20 years my kids aren’t combing through screenshots of the amazon order return barcode.

Back to my super practical, photo organization strategy:

The other day I pulled up to Selah’s school drive line, shifted into park, and decided I’d spend the few minutes before it started doing my daily photo purge.

As it turns out, five years ago that day we were at clinic. So many January photos are cancer-related; it’s honestly a month I should probably skip altogether.

A video came up. I clicked play.

In it, Beaudin is about to have his port accessed. He’s timid—more than usual. I’m recording, likely to show his dad later. Beau used to ask to rewatch moments like this, proof of his own bravery.

The video opens with my voice as he squirms:
“Beaudin, behave or I’m taking away Buzzy.”

Buzzy was a vibrating, bee-shaped device kids could use to distract themselves from procedures. It was our first time using it. Beau is nervous—really nervous. He pushes back on the nurse’s calm, rehearsed assurances that it will “go quick” and that he will “be brave.” You can hear the nurse coaxing while Beau does everything he can to buy time.

What complicates this is the medical reality: a port access is a central line access, which means sterile. Once the site is cleaned, the access has to happen promptly. Eventually the nurse convinces Beau to move forward and inserts the 1.5-inch needle into his port. And all hell breaks loose.

The pain that was promised to be “just in his head” is very real. He cries, trying to pull off his mask, which he can’t do because his port is accessed without a cover—they’re just drawing labs and then de-accessing it, leaving an exposed central line. The nurses try to balance kindness with necessity, gently but firmly telling him to keep the mask on.

He’s crying hot tears, looking at me:
“You said it wouldn’t hurt! The Emla didn’t work!”

The video drops to the floor. I’ve clearly forgotten I’m recording.
“It’s okay, bubba. Deep breath.”

I don’t know if I’ve ever watched this video before, but my body doesn’t know the difference between now and five years ago. I’m right back there. My stomach tightens as I remember all the times I applied Emla, smoothing it over his port, promising it would help—hoping it would help enough, hoping he’d be in a good enough mood not to notice the rest.

But more than anything, I feel sick over that first line. The threat.
Behave.

Behave because he was squirrely.
Behave because what his body needed to regulate didn’t look like good behavior.

Beaudin was seven years old, about to have a 1.5-inch needle pushed with force into his body, just above his clavicle—and my focus was on making sure he behaved.

I know more now about the nervous system. About how behaviors can come from deeply protective, healthy instincts. And honestly, outside of moments like this, I was often pretty good at that understanding. But cancer is a crash course.

At clinic, Beau was remarkably silly in ways he never was at home—not because he was defiant or poorly behaved, but because his nervous system was finding a way to survive.

On my better days, I have so much grace for myself. So much compassion for a mother doing her absolute best to parent a child who was both growing up and wading through trauma.

But on this particular day—a random Tuesday in January, five years later—while cleaning out my photo stream, all I could feel was the weight of all the behaving Beau was asked to carry.

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I start ahead in drive line and suddenlyI am back in Philly. It’s January 2022, we are there for the HuCarT boost. Clinic at CHOP is different—you get chemo in a bay with four to six chairs, separated only by curtains. There are several bays divided by half walls, which is to say: nothing is private.

By this point, Beau was three years into treatment. He had done his fair share of behaving, and he’d also learned how to listen to the things nurses say that may or may not be true, but that you are expected to believe anyway. He was getting lymph-depleting chemo ahead of his HuCART boost, the same old song and dance we’d done two times before in these same chairs. He was an old pro.

He sat reading his book while I cross-stitched—not as precious as it sounds; there are only so many hundreds of hours you can watch Netflix—and I watched the sun crawl across the clouded January Philadelphia sky. It was an only a 20 minute chemo, but it was so toxic it required two hours of pre-hydration, and 2 hours post. We’d be there the better part of the day. No matter, time stood still, he seemed zoned out, barely aware of a world beyond the strange pod we’d grown so familiar with.

In the bay behind us, rose the cries of a young little girl who was about to be accessed. She was not having it. She screamed and fought, cried and wailed. She couldn’t have been over 3 years old. It was a lot to overhear.

As she cried, the parents filled the air with frenetic promises:
“It’s okay, take this. You’re so brave. Here, take the goldfish. You’re okay. It won’t hurt. You’re brave.”

A stream of consciousness any cancer parent knows—the words you spill out when you don’t even know what you’re saying anymore, but the port is about to be accessed whether the child agrees or not.

“They should stop telling her that,” Beau said, without looking up from his book.

I paused. It was clear he’d been paying close attention to the commotion behind us.

“Yeah,” I exhaled.

“The lying doesn’t help,” he added.

“I think they’re just trying to help, it’s not exactly lying…” I offered slowly, the words sounding like both an explanation and an apology—for every similar moment I’d ever had with him.

“They should just give her a second,” he said. “She can be brave without people yelling at her that she is.”

The overflow of words stopped as I imagine her port was finally accessed. All that remained were the sniffled cries of a little girl weeping into her mother’s shoulder.

“This is stupid,” I whispered.

“The worst,” Beau agreed, and turned the page.

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TLDR: Don’t bother looking back at old photos, ever. Let them pile up and over and simply commit to buying more and more cloud storage.

Jokes aside. It’s all part of it. It all belongs. Though sometimes I wonder if our ability to record every moment, specifically those that are traumatizing, is actually good for us. The verdict is still out.