There Went That Summer
by Lucy Orloski

I was never a rough and tumble kind of person. I was very careful in everything I did, and to this day my planbook is my best friend. Due to this attitude towards life, scars weren't something that I amassed in great numbers.

What I was missing in quality of life I certainly made up for in quantity of scars the summer between my 8th and 9th grade year. I remember everything very distinctly. On June 16th, two days after school let out, I was due to go to a local concert that I'd been looking forward to for months. Rustic Overtones were coming to the Waterville Opera House, and tickets were only ten bucks. I was all set to have an absolute blast.

The afternoon before the concert, though, I was sitting around at home looking at myself in the mirror. I noticed two red spots on my cheek that hadn't been there earlier that morning. Dealable. A few hours later I was back in front of the mirror, and discovered three more spots. I called my father to discuss the phenomenon. I was starting to feel sick by this point. By the time he came home an hour later, the spots were all over my body and numbering near a hundred. I didn't go to the concert.

The case of chicken pocks lasted two entire weeks before it started to die down. Every square inch of my skin was covered. To this day, I've blocked out what I looked like. My father kept a picture, so I could look back on it in amazement if I ever wanted to. The itching was so bad that I would go into convulsions. I didn't sleep for the majority of that two weeks. The hospital gave me codeine to help with the itching. (I passed out from a codeine overdose the day I got the stuff.)

I didn't even venture outside until August, and then only to go kayaking out on a remote lake where I knew no one would see me. I was definitely disfigured. To top it off, I was starting high school in a new school in less than a month. I couldn't even imagine how I'd do it.

Basically, I did it with a motherload of foundation. The scars have cleared up immensely, vitually vanishing from my legs. I still have little bumps about 3 millimeters in diameter spread across my stomach and arms. My face, thankfully, is left with only a few indents that are hardly noticable. The scars that I tried to picture (I darkened it) are slightly larger than the rest and haven't gone away like the others. My guess is is that it's because they're on my neck, where the skin is moving around a lot, so it's harder for them to break down.

My parents didn't tell me until about a month ago that everyone, the hospital included, were actually fearing for my life. I'm not so surprised that I've got most of it blocked out.

In any event. Get your vaccinations, folks. Chicken pocks after five isn't thrilling.

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