Lorna "Lor" Van Diepen*

[xylophonefairy*]

Name: Lorna "Lor" Marie Van Diepen
Gender: Female
Age: 18
Grade: 12th
School: Aurora High School
Hobbies and Interests: Running, track, vlogging, charity work, travelling

Appearance: Standing at 5'7" and weighing 119lbs Lor is actually slightly underweight and this shows. She is thin; her bones press through the skin at her joints but her arms and long legs have muscles that betray her athletic past. Her shoulders tend to be hunched over and she has small breasts. There are several scars on her chest from biopsies and from her Hickmann line and portacath. Knobbly veins can be seen running down her arms and over the backs of her hands. The gnarled joints on her fingers appear almost arthritic, though she doesn't have any problems with them.

She has fair, slightly tanned skin and straight, dark brown hair that she keeps cut short in a choppy style that sits just below her jaw and frames her oval shaped face well. There are permanent dark circles under her eyes that no amount of sleep will get rid of and that she tends to cover up with makeup. She often ties her hair into a very short ponytail that sticks straight out from the back of her head, or in two low bunches. Her large, roundish eyes are grey in colour and topped by sparse eyebrows that she has to fill in with an eyebrow pencil. Equally thin are her eyelashes; for a special occasion she will wear fake ones but doesn't bother most of the time. She has a longish, straight nose and a narrow mouth with thin lips.

Lor tends to dress fairly sportily, preferring either flat pumps or training shoes with shorts or a short skirt worn over leggings, long, brightly coloured tank tops, and a variety of hoodies in different colours. Often she will associate the colours she is wearing with her mood, but nobody has picked up on this yet and her mood when she gets dressed in the morning is often different by the time she gets to school. Sometimes she will wear a hat from her large collection in varying styles, from beanies in the winter to baseball caps in the summer. She tends to always have a patterned rucksack with her in which she keeps a plain black anorak for when it inevitably starts to rain.

Biography: Lorna was born on an exceptionally cold day in February, the 5th, to Jack Van Diepen and his wife Penny in a small town in Colorado. They were just eighteen and the wedding had been a rushed affair a few months previously when Penny found out she was pregnant. Jack had just enlisted in the US Air Force, and the pregnancy could not have come at a worse time for the young couple. Lorna, named after Penny's mother who had died a few years before, didn't do much to help her parents when she was a baby. She was a difficult child, easily bored and thus demanding of her mother's attention, unaware of the absence of her father who was attending military training.

When Lorna was eighteen months old, they were moved to Texas to live on an air base, and it is from there that many of her childhood memories begin. Lorna's brother, Leo, was born on base just before her third birthday to the relief of her parents as he provided a much needed distraction. Despite the awkward age gap, the two children got on well when they were small; Lorna quickly proved herself to be something of a tomboy and preferred to run amok around the army base with the other boys her age than to play with some of the softer girls. She was Leo's ticket to play with the 'big kids', even if he often ended up playing an unfortunate role in their games. It was while they were living in Texas that she first insisted that everyone called her Lor because one of the boys said that Lorna was a 'sissy name' and the nickname stuck ever since. From a young age Lor and Leo were strictly disciplined, lest any misbehaviour on their parts have a negative effect on their dad's career.

When Lor was six the family moved to a tiny base in northern Italy. The base was very closely integrated with the nearby town, and they found themselves becoming used to small town Italian life. While there was an international school for the older kids, the younger ones were sent instead to the local primary school. All their lessons were taught in Italian, meaning that Lor and Leo were forced to pick up the language quickly. Lor thrived in this environment, the area was incredibly safe and they were free to run around the countryside with their friends, eating fruit picked straight from the trees. It was noticed by her teachers that while she didn't have any great aptitude for her lessons, she was very good at running. At the school sports day she won the 'long distance' running event, actually only one lap around the school field, by a significant margin, and her parents started encouraging her to develop this skill. Happy to have something to focus her energy on, Lor became mixed up in a world of personal bests and not long after her seventh birthday her dad arranged for one of his colleagues to train her twice a week. At this point her parents weren't entirely sure what they were training her for; only that they had noticed their eldest daughter had a skill and that they should probably nurture it.

It was with sadness that Jack was transferred back to the US after eighteen months in Italy,when she was seven, but they were fortunate to get a placement in Colorado. The family adored living there; Lor and Leo got to know their extended family properly for the first time in their lives. The two siblings grew closer together after living fairly separate lives in Italy and got on extremely well. At the school she attended when they moved back to the US she spoke only in Italian for the first week, and her parents were phoned at their home to make sure that she did actually speak English. Talking a different language to the rest of the kids was alienating, so she gave it up quickly.

When Lor was ten they were moved to California where they had their first fairly long term placement in years while Jack was deployed to the Middle East. Having already learnt how to integrate herself at a new school, Lor was quick to get on with her classmates and find a few friends. This school was particularly good at getting its pupils involved, and Lor started taking up all manner of extracurricular activities to see how well she liked them. Most importantly here was she seriously took up running. Her dad paid for her to join a private athletics club and she started receiving high quality training. She concentrated mainly on the 1500m race, frequently representing the school. When she was thirteen she qualified for a state final in the 1500m and came third, something that sparked the attention of several people important in selection for several teams.

Shortly after this event her dad was transferred, again, this time to Tacoma in Washington in what was to turn out to be their last significant move. He was moving into a different field, previously having worked in a more practical role in aircrew operations, he had been trying to move into intelligence, something he had always wanted to do, and finally had an opportunity for a training post. Lor contested this move furiously, her athletic career was taking off and there were whispers at her athletics club of representing the state. But, being thirteen and her father being as ambitious as she was, she was overruled and they moved north up the West Coast, to a military base just south of Tacoma. Her mother, Penny, was also unhappy by the move and how Jack seemed to disregard his daughter's career in favour of his own, and for a while their marriage teetered. Lor tried to ignore the tensions at home by disappearing off to the athletics club, often taking Leo along with her to save him from the strain.

Fortunately, the school in Tacoma was a good one with excellent sporting facilities and connections. Lor joined another athletics club, and quickly worked her way up the ranks. She began an intensive training schedule, often running in the early hours and after school. At her peak she was competing regularly in district and state competitions. Seeing how happy their children were, her parents reconciled. Lor made an effort to get on with them, she was grateful to her dad for paying for her athletics training. Though the family was comfortable, they were never particularly well off and she often wondered if there were things they were going without because of her.

About a month before her fifteenth birthday she developed a cough. Not wanting it to have any impact on her training schedule, Lor blamed it on a normal winter cold and claimed it wasn't affecting her abilities. Initially it didn't; she managed to hide it for a few weeks until her performance started slipping. Her coach, a tough ex-military man named Michel was, to begin with, unforgiving. Having always tried hard, this irritated her and caused her performance to slip further. In mid February, while on the track, they were having a particularly vociferous argument about the fact that she was running a full minute slower than her personal best when she had a coughing fit and started bringing up a small amount of blood. Michel immediately called an ambulance and she was taken into hospital. There she confessed to a multitude of other symptoms she had been hiding, the fact that she felt exhausted all the time, waking up in the night sweating, lacking an appetite, losing weight, an unusual pain on the right side of her chest. Given her history of living abroad and her symptoms, there was a high suspicion of tuberculosis, and she was sent for a chest x-ray later that same day. The scan showed a lesion on her right lung which was biopsied a couple of days later. The biopsy didn't show TB; instead it was positive for Hodgkin's Lymphoma, stage IIB. Less than two weeks after the ambulance was called, on March 1st, she had her official diagnosis.

Life changed immediately. The early stage of her disease and the fact that she had previously been fit meant that she had an excellent chance of survival, but only if she went through intensive treatment which was started just two days after her official diagnosis. In the months that followed this she had six four week cycles of ABVD chemotherapy. During this time she suffered badly with side effects such as nausea, hair loss, and developed an arrhythmia as a result of the heart damage caused by the adriamycin that took a long time to heal. It was incredibly trying for the entire family. Leo, by now aged twelve, started acting out; running away from home, being insolent at school. Lor was irritable and withdrawn, she had never been very good at being ill, and spent a long time trying to work out what it was she was being punished for. The rest of the time was spent watching TV and playing video games and begging the friends she had only had for a few months to visit her more frequently. After her sixth cycle, on a particularly hot day in August she was declared in complete remission.

Slowly the Van Diepens started getting back to a normal life. Just after finishing treatment Lor was able to start back at school at the beginning of her sophomore year, the high school she had barely started at when she fell ill. But the relief was mixed in with anger. Following her illness and treatment she was a lot weaker than she was before. Gentle exercise was encouraged in her healing process, but she was unable to compete at even a district level. Running had been her life for so long that she found it difficult to deal with this.

Her luck worsened further when she was diagnosed with a relapse of her cancer only three months after her remission, in late November of that year. This time it was more aggressive than before, with additional sites in her neck and groin and in only a few weeks she went from being relatively well to so weak she couldn't walk. Her doctors doubted that the treatment she had undergone before would help, and suggested instead that she be entered in a trial at a bigger university hospital in Seattle. Desperate to save their daughter her parents signed the consent forms for the treatment, and it started only a few days after she was diagnosed with her relapse.

While Lor was starting the new chemotherapy regimen the rest of the family made a decision. Her father applied for a desk job in intelligence analysis. Her mother decided that they should move to Seattle to be nearer the hospital if anything should go wrong. The new treatment was far more gruelling than the last lot, and she didn't have the energy to fight anyone any more. Whereas before her survival had been almost guaranteed, this time it teetered at just below fifty percent and Lor was acutely aware of this fact. During this time she became much closer to her parents and brother, and would actively seek out their company when she was feeling low instead of finding a way to deal with it on her own as she had always done before. A lot of her free time was spent watching low budget movies on cable with her dad, gossiping with her mother, and playing video games with Leo. After about a month of the treatment, she decided that she needed some purpose in life, and started a video blog. Initially it was for their family back in Colorado, whom she had grown close to in the months they spent living there, but after a while she started picking up followers that she didn't know, and over the next few months it started to escalate. Her acerbic commentary on life with cancer seemed to attract people's attention, and she thrived on that attention. It gave something to live for. When she felt particularly bad she sometimes had Leo make videos on her behalf, slightly irritated to see how popular his videos were.

After eight months of intensive chemotherapy she was fortunate to be declared back in remission. It was almost exactly a year after her first remission, though this day in August was cloudy. Again she was started back at school in September; initially she was on a slightly reduced timetable, which was gradually increased until she was on a full timetable again. At this time a decision was made by Leo; he refused to change school again and move back to Tacoma. After contesting that move he had found that he was actually happier at the school in Seattle. So Lor started at the high school that Leo would soon start with all his friends and the move to Seattle was made permanent. Somehow the Van Diepen family had become civilians, and Lor actually found the experience quite interesting. The idea of people growing up with the same people, never getting to have a fresh start, had always fascinated her. It was also weird that she might need to make lasting relationships if her family was going to be living here for a while. Lor had spent a lot of her life hiding behind the fact that it wouldn't be too long before nobody remembered her name, and she liked that sense of freedom. But if there was anything that she was good at, fitting into new situations was one of them. She had already met a couple of people from Track meets and district competitions that she kept in contact with while she was unwell, and found that when meeting new people she had a fairly interesting story to tell.

A year after her second remission, when she hadn't had any episodes of irregular heartbeat for over three months, she was declared healthy enough to start running again. This news was welcomed with enthusiasm, despite the fact that high intensity training was still discouraged. She joined the track team at Aurora and started competing at school events, but it often frustrates her that she is still a long way away from her previous skill level. From time to time she still feels angry about what has been taken away from her; especially in 2012, considering there was a chance for a while that she could have been competing for her country in the Olympics. These moods can strike with little provocation and she becomes irritable and unreasonable. This usually occurs when she is around her family, with whom she is still closer to than she might otherwise be. Sometimes Penny is still very overprotective of Lor, reminding her to wash fruit well before eating it and similar advice, which Lor finds very frustrating as there is a part of her that wants to forget that her illness ever happened. Jack tries to take her side in these matters, and she is appreciative of this.

Sometimes she looks down on come of the other students in the school whom she sees as less worldly, especially those who have never even lived outside of the state. She currently lives a fairly straight edge lifestyle, her years running and later becoming seriously ill means that she takes good care of her body, making sure she always eats well, sleeps enough, and avoids alcohol. Her military background means that she is always punctual, tries hard in school and always completes homework on time; despite these things she rarely earns above a C. One of her skills, practised by years of moving around, is that she can tell stories well and is a good public speaker. She has an ability to make even fairly boring stories seem interesting; one of the reasons her video blog is successful. There are some slightly obsessive traits to her personality; she always likes to know what the time is and to have things ordered neatly and preferably symmetrically.

Lor continues to update her video blog every couple of days to a few thousand followers, even though there is no defined purpose any more. She finds it ironic that what she considers to be the least interesting part of her life so far, when she isn't moving, competing or ill, is the part that she broadcasts to the world. Following the success of his own videos, Leo has started his own blog, and the siblings often appear in each other's videos. Additionally, in the last few years she has started raising money for lymphoma research and teenage cancer charities. Following high school she is currently planning to take a few years off to travel, maybe visiting some of the places she grew up in, particularly her family in Colorado and the Italian town.

Advantages: Having spent a lot of her childhood moving around, Lor is used to meeting people and having to form relationships quickly, meaning that she would be good at making alliances on the island. She has an incredibly determined streak, tending to do well at things when she puts her mind to it. She is still fairly good at running so she could get away from any adversaries quickly.
Disadvantages: Lor has never fully regained her strength, gets tired easily and needs a lot of sleep to make up for any physical exercise. She is prone to passive anger when put in an unfortunate situation and this might cloud her ability to make good choices. The fact that she looks down on a lot of her peers means that she might find it hard to sustain any alliances that she forms. While the arrhythmia hasn't affected her for a long time, there is a chance that the increased stress on the island could cause it to relapse.