Where Has Olivia Been?

And why hasn't she been posting?

Besides the obvious--right here--and the usual--she's been too lazy busy--Olivia actually has some pretty good reasons for sealing herself from the world.

Exhibit A:

Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus.

That's right, Olivia had MRSA.

That--that purple thing was inside of her!

It's kind of paradoxical, really, that something such a pretty shade of purple could be so wicked, and in the wicked-bad kind of way rather than the wicked-good or wicked-cold kind of way.

"Um, Olivia," you say, "it's not really purple. It's only purple because smart scientist people dyed it that way so you could see it better."

"Oh, yeah, um, right. I knew that." She tugs on her blonde hair. "I just forget things sometimes!"

Still, it's a blasphemous usage of the color purple!

You might be wondering now what having MRSA entails. (And what it means: it is a staph bacterium that has mutated to be resistant to a number of antibiotics, which makes it doubly nasty.)

Well, to abridge this story, Olivia got a small pump on her leg which was very sore, and then it got very, VERY sore, and then she got more very, VERY sore sores on her legs which then burst and gushed blood and pus everywhere (it's a very, VERY good thing that Olivia takes a fascination to these things and is not easily disgusted by blood and pus, because if she were, she would have retched on top of it all). On Monday Olivia had a doctor's appointment already scheduled, and when the doctor took one look at the worst of the sores, she told Olivia's mother to take her to the ER and get admitted to the hospital.

Olivia was rather angry when she heard this. Olivia, you see, HATES hospitals. This is also a little paradoxical, because Olivia is quite fond of science and especially of medical-related things, but she LOATHES medical environments with every fiber of her being. (Her mother wants her to be a pediatrician, but Olivia says she would die to spend any more of her life in a clinical setting than she already does, and instead desires to become a large animal veterinarian, so she can largely work outdoors.) 

She also learned she has a good deal of depression which she keeps at bay by staying insanely busy, but being idle in the hospital, which is an exceedingly dark and gloomy place to begin with, put her over the edge, and she sobbed, inconsolable, for hours, even though she was responding very well to the treatment and knew she would probably get to go home very soon.

Overall, her two nights (and threeish days combined) in the hospital were a very dark and slightly traumatizing time she prefers not to think about, but she survived emotionally by reading Job (and especially 6:10) and praying (for herself and others) and reading some Hamlet (which is NOT what you should read when you need a pick-me-upper, though it is very well written), and she has a large group of truly amazing friends (and family) who prayed for her, and she responded amazingly well to the antibiotics and got to go home Wednesday, and was well enough with the doctor's permission to go to homeschool co-op Thursday, a piano lesson Friday, work on the ongoing project of revamping her room Saturday, and go antiquing and bookshopping* (you can save that footnote till you get to the end of this sentence, because that footnote is long, but you probably already read that footnote anyway, so sorry, and I'm just stretching out this paragraph now) with her mom Sunday, and resume run-on-sentencing on Monday, though the people she came into contact with treated her a bit like a leper, for which she can't really blame them, because MRSA is nasty and nobody wants it.

(And yes, she might have made that sentence super long just for the sake of it and to show you that she is much better now.)

She shall continue her antibiotics course till Thursday, and while her wounds are still a bit sore when she moves in a certain way, they are much, much improved. (She was in so much pain in the hospital, the nurses wanted her to take narcotics, but Olivia does not like feeling loopy, so she only took Tylenol, and dealt with the pain.)

Well, and there you have it: the tale of Olivia's hospital trauma experience, which turned out to be augmented rather than abridged. To (badly) paraphrase Mark Twain, she doesn't have the time to write a short post.

So hopefully now you understand why Olivia has not been up to blogging lately. Hopefully, she will blog a bit more if she finds the time once she makes up for a week unproductivity, though she doesn't really NEED to make up for it, because no one forces a school or any other schedule upon her but herself, and she was so immensely productive last semester she kind of needed a break; she just feels slightly panicky when she is not intensely productive (it probably goes back to keeping that depression at bay).


*She met two pretty cool people at Barnes & Noble. The first showed her to the Shakespeare section, and she had recently played Olivia in a production of Twelfth Night. Then, as Olivia was checking out (well, really her mother was doing the checking out, but anyway) with a rather nerdy stack of books (Twelfth Night, The Tempest, a nonfiction book on Shakespeare, Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, and Tennessee William's The Glass Menagerie) (yes, Olivia is doing a self-conducted study of drama), the woman checking them out asked which class she was in, for two classes at a nearby university were reading the latter two plays. When Olivia's mother told her that Olivia was, in fact, reading them purely for fun, and that she was a tenth grade homeschooler, the lady didn't even bat an eye, for she too had been homeschooled, and therefore understood these things.

That was almost as long as some of the footnotes in some of the editions of Shakespeare Olivia looked at. She is leaving it in a large font, to spare your eyes.