Randi Voss Photography, Pittsburgh Wedding Photographer

Once during college, I was super sick. I had a terrible stomach ache all of the time. I wasn’t hungry, I wasn’t full. I told my mom (a nurse) about my problem. Like most nurses treat their own families, she told me “you’re fine,” and of course I believed her.

After a week, things weren’t getting any better. I had a busy day at school with a Fluid Mechanics exam and some kind of oral presentation for my writing class, “Technical Communications for Engineers and Scientists.” At the end of the day I walked back to my apartment and slept for a few hours. I asked Ryan to come and stay in my apartment that night because I was feeling so bad. The next morning, I knew something was really, really wrong. I called my mom and dad at 5am and asked them to take me to the hospital.

I was examined in the ER by a great set of doctors and nurses, I was told I had appendicitis, and I would have surgery at noon. The doctors expected my recovery to take two days, then I would be back at class. After my morphine drip, I didn’t see why I needed surgery at all and I was ready to walk right out of there in my hospital gown. I went to surgery anyway. The OR called my parents during the surgery to inform them that my appendix had BURST a week prior to my arrival at the hospital and my body was full of infection. Wow! In case you don’t know (I didn’t), a person could die within an hour of having a burst appendix, so it was amazing that I was alive a week later!

I stayed in the hospital for 8 days, lost twenty pounds, and recovered slowly.   I was a special case and was visited by a room FULL of medical students every morning looking at my chart and asking me “didn’t it hurt?”  My awesome family (Mom, Dad, and Nicki)and friends (Ryan, Erin Paull, and Kristin McNeil) visited me all of the time. When I went home, my sister and my boyfriend (now husband) had no problem picking on a sick girl as they constantly made fun of my thin frame and the fact that I had no butt. Not like I had a butt anyway, but after this, I had to buy new pants. Thankfully, the Carnegie Mellon staff was super awesome and I was able to continue my classes for the semester after a 2.5 week absence.

Here are some photos from Spring Break at the end of March 2003 when Ryan and I went to Florida on a cruise. I was still very weak and often sleepy, but I had a great time.  Here you can see my giant head and super skinny arms.

Ryan and I parasailing.    Sorry ladies, he’s all mine.

This is one of my favorite photos ever.  I took it on the cruise as our ship left the dock.  I was on the deck, watching, and I saw it.  I ran back to my room to get my camera(film SLR), hoping that the sun and the people would behave and stay exactly as they were.   Thankfully everyone cooperated and the image was the centerpiece of my 2004 photography show at Pittsburgh Filmmakers.  I include it here because it made me want to understand lighting and fueled my passion for what I do today.

SO today, February 26, 2010, I celebrate 7 years since my emergency appendectomy and I’m still alive. I call in “Ind-Appendix Day.” Yay for being alive!

Last weekend, I decided to upgrade to this fancy new blog-site format.  You like it?  I do!

It has taken me until now, nearly a full 6 days (forever in internet time) to “launch” the site because of problems with my hosting company and the functionality of their servers.  You might have noticed this if you have visited recently and clicked on any of the tabs at the top of the page that link within this blog-site.

I was working on Saturday afternoon, rerouting all of my URLs to direct to my new site home www.randivossphotography.com. I’m not an expert at writing code, by any stretch of the imagination, but I thought I could handle this.  Apparently not.  I was working, testing things out, and then, POOF, no website.  Nothing.  I couldn’t log into my site manager, my FTP account was empty, my site was gone. Sorry to “nerd out” on you there, but it was pretty upsetting.

Right away, I contacted my hosting company for help.  They have excellent customer service, with both a 1-800 number and Live Online Chats.  I was helped very quickly in an online chat, writing frantically to describe my issue.  Matt R explained to me that there was a problem with the servers and that my website outage would be resolved, without data loss.

Matt R.: Unfortunately, the issue is not yet resolved. The updated ETR is 7:00 PM MST.

Randi: okay (and sorry if my code meddling crashed the internet)

Matt R.: I seriously doubt that your code is at fault.

Well, that was hilarious to Ryan.  Turns out that there is no way the server problems were my fault which was confirmed when I received this email.

“On Saturday, February 20th at approximately 2:20 p.m. MDT, the server your account is on experienced some hardware failure as a result of an annual fire system inspection at our Data Center (DC). An inadvertent release of Inergen was triggered in the DC environment. The release was triggered by an actuator that was not removed as required in the DC’s pre-test checklist. As such, the entire DC was impacted at some level, however not all servers were affected. This error was not the result of a mistake by WestHost employees, our hardware or systems. The mistake was triggered by an error from a vendor. With that said, we take responsibility and are doing everything we can to restore all systems completely.”

Basically, the sprinklers went off and the servers got wet.  I regained some functionality over the next few days, but some links within my site were still experiencing an “Internal Server Error.”  Five days later, I’m back online and feeling fine.

Now for the good part……what do you think of my new blog-site?  Now that I can access my site, I’m planning more changes now and adding new galleries and information over the next few weeks.