I figured now was a good time to bring this up.

Is there anyone here (besides myself) who finds worth in the Survival Memorial as more than just an event item? I get somewhat melancholy when I see it, because I actually am a survivor. Ironically enough, I became a survivor in February.

I suppose it could have more than one meaning depending on the person. I never really thought of that before... :D

I do, but for a different reason. I always loved the poem. It reminds me of my dad and I've teared up reading it before. It's very lovely. Congratulations on becoming a survivor by the way. Keep up the amazing work. ❤️

nah, I wasn't even here for the first zombie event so it doesn't even have THAT meaning for me, really. What are you a survivor from?

I know what you mean. That poem would probably have gotten to me even before it gained such relevance for me. xD Heh, thanks. ^^;

I wasn't either. :v But I get what you meant. xD Ah, actually I survived a brain tumor. :/ It's quite a long story.

Oh wow! Congrats on surviving, I hope you are well. I wouldn't mind hearing the story if you wouldn't mind telling it. :) That's pretty exciting, actually.

xD Thanks. It was four years ago, so I'm pretty well healed now. Still dealing with some things, though. Nah, I wouldn't mind telling it so much. I don't know how well I could do right now given my lack of sleep, but I'll give it a shot. Like I said though, it's a really long story. Do you want the full thing, or a simplified version?

It always kinda makes me smile a little bit, my grandmother is now a 10 year breast cancer survivor so really any time I see anything involving surviving or overcoming I kind of smile a little - glad I'm not the only one!

Also, congrats on your survival and recovery, and I hope everything is smooth sailing from here on out for you. (:

I'm sorry, I asked about your story and then I disappeared! I'm so bad about that sometimes. D: How about the simple version. orz;

Heh, whoops. xD Well, welcome back. c: The mechanics behind how everything got started is something of a mystery. All I know is that one day during my final year of elementary school, I passed out out of the blue. I'd been on the swings with a couple of my friends, when I lost the ability to control my muscles and started to fall backward. I blacked out before I hit the ground, and when I came to my friends were sitting over top of me asking if I was okay and the swing I'd fallen off of was perfectly still. It wasn't long after that - maybe somewhere from a week to a month - that I started having "dizzy spells". I would just get really dizzy out of nowhere, but it would only last for a few seconds. Everyone expected me to just grow out of it, but instead the spells just got worse as I got older. I actually learned how to tell when I was about to have one. None of us knew what was going on with the dizzy spells until my mother caught me having a full seizure in my sleep one night. By then however, my mind was starting to degrade as all of my energy was being put into fighting the seizures. This made it quite difficult to get my neurologist to believe us, and as such things just kept getting worse. It got to the point where I could only remember things for about three to five seconds after they happened. Things didn't get moving until I discovered that I had lost half of my sight. At the time, I was well aware of the fact that I was dieing. I didn't actually care, though. I'd already given up. The only thing I wanted was to be able to draw until the very end, and I was terrified of not getting that wish. Once I realized I was going blind, it was like a switch was flipped. It was instinctive, not rational thinking that took me over then. I decided that I had to go through surgery, because I would rather live with my sight than die blind. Everything was like a blur after that - the only thing I remember is the dream of falling into a pool that I started to have, night after night. The surgery itself went by with almost no problems, though it cost me most of my memories and the loss if sight is permanent.

Heh, maybe it's not to convincing when I type all of this as "the short version". I have left out a lot, though.

Wow! That's actually really fascinating. I'd love to hear more details. So was it a tumor or something? Was the surgery you went through brain surgery? And you're not losing your sight anymore? I draw too. I can't imagine losing my sight. What's it like not having your memories? (I don't know if that's a valid question, since you might not have anything to compare it to..)

How many more details do you want to hear? xD The entire thing is quite convoluted, but I'll tell you if you're interested. As for your questions, it was a tumor and yes, it was brain surgery. No, my sight is at least stable now. If it wasn't, I'd be in some serious trouble. It was the lack of brain function that originally gave me the blindness, and now that part of my brain is gone entirely.

I actually have a fair portion of my memory back now, granted it's a small portion of what I used to know (or so I would guess, at this point I'm starting to wonder) but it makes a difference. Before I started to regain my memories though, I actually didn't care that they were gone. As far as I was concerned, "You can't miss was you never had." I knew that phrase wasn't entirely right since I lost something I did have, but that's exactly how I felt about it. Where my mind had been reverted back to that of a little kid after the surgery, it was as though I'd just been given life. As my mental age grew though, I started to realize that there was life before the surgery. I tried not to let it bother me, but the truth was that I felt like my heart had been gouged out. This lead to the eventual realization that I didn't know anything about who I was anymore, because without my memory I didn't have the experience to know even my likes or dislikes. Since then, I've been trying to learn more about myself. While I still don't remember exactly what kind of things I knew back then, I do know that I know a lot more now than I used to. Well, except school-wise. I'm still trying to re-learn stuff like math (which I used to be really good at). :/