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She Who is Me

The person I say I am, for you to know as well.
Aka: A strange way of saying "Hello, here's my bio." 

Hello all, I'm Olive, and welcome to my personal blog! 

I am 18 years old, born and raised in a little town in Alberta, Canada. I have quite a few hobbies - my favorites being  playing piano, writing, and drawing, and spending time outdoors, including horseback riding, and taking pictures. 

I can't say enough how much I love writing.  I was able to study Creative Writing with a fantastic teacher who taught me how to think outside of the box and has propelled me to constantly work on my pieces and who helped me create many of the poems and prose pieces here on this site! 

 

 I currently have many writing projects on the go, but they are all my babies. I have a novel series in progress, which I started roughly 5 years ago. I still struggle with prose, making it something other than rigid dialog and awkward character movements, but the story always has me excited. I'm constantly designing characters, scenarios and new ways to approach the foundations of the story line that have been  running through my head  for years. 

I've also worked on my own poetry book. This project is far more recent, but it doesn't prevent me from putting as much thought into its details. I just finished late 2018, and I couldn't be prouder. All the writing, artwork, even the font is all my own.  Its actually up for sale here.  I still can't believe it done, but I'm so proud. 

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Something few people know is about me is that I have a neurological condition called "PANS". The long form is "Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Syndrome." It's a lot of big words, but basically it means that my immune system attacks my brain. I've had my whole life, but I was never diagnosed until 2015.

 

There are great variances in its severity from person to person, but for me, it started as fatigue. I was tired a lot, and I wasn't able to do as much as other kids my age.  When I reached the ago of about 15, it suddenly got a whole lot worse. I couldn't focus on school, I was more tired than ever, and my mood was abysmal - i couldn't cope with stress, and I was frustrated, constantly anxious and upset. At the time, I was also in dance, and it effected my ability to do that too.

 

I had done dance my whole life, so while it was  still a learning process, but I wasn't entirely new to the concepts.  the way I've always described it was that dancing was like hitting an invisible brick wall. The teacher would ask us to work on a dance movement or practice it across the floor, and I would understand what I was supposed to do,  but I just couldn't get my body to listen. 

 

Eventually, we figured out something was wrong and flew down to Dallas, Texas to a neurology clinic where I was diagnosed with PANS. The treatment was SubqIG - four needles in my stomach every other week for an hour.

 I did it for months and while I was able to get some minor relief, it wasn't able to help on the scale it needed to. Later, we went to Washington DC to a clinic specifically for the treatment of PANS and its sister condition, PANDAS.

 

It was extremely expensive, but we were still able to get it for both me, and my mom, who also has the same condition (she's had the adult version of PANS for as long as I've had it). We were injected with the same thing that I was injected with with the SubQ, but injections were through the veins, in a much higher dose, and done over the course of 2 days, instead of 6 months.

 

The after effects felt like death, but once they passed, all we had to do was wait. It took a year for it to totally do what it was meant to do and it worked! We still don't have "normal"  health, but we can do so much more than before. 

 

With this energy, I have two goals I'd love to someday accomplish. Frist, I'd like to finish my novel series. I want to create so that it highlights protagonists who are disfigured, of a range of nationalities, and with mental health problems. Second, I want to raise awareness and money for those suffering from PANS and PANDAS, it's hard to diagnose, and expensive to treat, so I want to give others like me the opportunity to get help and go back to living a normal life. 

Thank you for reading, enjoy the site! 

All images, drawings and writings, are mine unless otherwise said. Please don't copy or reproduce them without permission or citing me (Olive @ Creatively Olive)  as the source. Thank you. 

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