Over the next several questions. Read it if you care about cancer, being sick, and my future plans for osu! and ask. I wrote this mostly to tie up everything I left open. I won't be 'coming back' to osu!. I won't be more active on ask.fm. If I do anything here or on any other channels it won't be osu! related. I'll leave this up for a while, and close my ask.fm at some point in the future.

Thanks to everyone that was here for me.

You don't appreciate your life, I guarantee it. You take your health for granted because you're young, you live in a good county, you take care of yourself, your family has money and insurance and you've gotten your yearly checkup since before you can remember. You don't appreciate what you have. You never will until you've looked into the mirror and saw death itself reaching through to take it all away from you. The first time I thought I was going to die was around two years ago. I was 21 years old and I was living what seemed like a charmed life. I spent a semester kicking ass at college finishing with a 3.9 unweighted GPA. I had a lot of money in the bank after saving what I earned working over the summer, and when you spend your weekdays studying and your weekends making maps on osu!, you really don't have a lot of chances to go out. But it wasn't so bad, my online life had just taken off and was out of control. I had just released Miss You and the storm surrounding that map can only be described as total insanity. Almost overnight people all around the world were talking about me.
People I used to look up to and for whom I had massive amounts of respect suddenly wanted to be my friend. I was finally getting admiration for my work as a mapper and it felt absolutely amazing. But after about a month of basking in the glory of "osu!'s next top mapper", things for real HanzeR started turning south.

At first, I lost all my energy. I would sleep for 12, 16, even 20 hours a day and never feel rested. It was as if my life force was being sucked away as I slept, like a thief siphoning the gasoline out of an unattended car. Like my energy the next thing to disappear was my appetite. Food I used to love became repulsive, and seemed to never leave my stomach the right way. I started to realize something was really wrong after going several days without eating a single thing. Eventually, the very thought of putting anything in my mouth would physically make me wretch. My attempts to force nutrition or water into my starving, dehydrated body only lead to vomiting in a constant vicious cycle. The first doctor that I saw told me I had nothing to worry about. She said I probably had the stomach flu and should rest and hydrate until it blows over. I was a little hesitant to accept this explanation. Deep inside I had a feeling something more sinister was at work, but I didn't know enough to question it and followed the doctor's orders

Until the fevers.

The second time I thought I was going to die, I wasn’t even sure if I’d be aware of it happening. When your entire body is being attacked it's compelled to devote all of it's energy to keep you alive, so functions like being able to walk, to converse, and even your sanity start to shut down. I would lay in bed and have conversations with the television. I would forget my name, or the name of the person I was talking to. More than once I woke up and had no idea where I was. For three days I lay in bed in constant agony and delirium as this invader sought suck me dry and drain absolutely everything it could from my frail, famished and dehydrated body. When my parents found me in my room I was basically catatonic. They rushed me to the hospital and brought me inside where a triage nurse took one look at me, shouted for a stretcher, and took me back to the ER. A flurry of nurses surrounded me and tried to put several IVs in my arm, but I was so dehydrated that they couldn’t find my veins. When the doctor finally walked in I can’t imagine what I would have looked like. Bandages from all the failed veins, Dual IVs in both arms, an oxygen mask, heart monitors, and ten different bags of I don't know what dripping from the IV pole into my body, desperately trying to keep me alive.

The third time I thought I was going to die, the lead doctor put his hand on my shoulder and with a somber look told me “We have no idea what’s wrong with you.” A team of doctors surrounded my bed each with their own set of questions; “What are you feeling right now?”, “Have you traveled out of the country?” “What’s your medical history like?” I could barely acknowledge them let alone respond to their questions, but until this past week I had been a completely normal 21 year old dude. One of the doctor’s cell phones started ringing, and he left the room. As he was walking out I heard him say “I’m down in room XXYZ. Yeah It’s bad, it’s really bad”. I’ll never forget the fear that I felt in that moment. I thought about my life, my family, my friends and everything important to me. I got to thinking about about all the time I wasted; what will they say about me when I'm gone? That I was a good osu! Mapper? Where were all those people online who wanted to be my friend now? I now saw how inconsequential all of that was. I was dying, but the saddest part was I would die without having left a memory of my existence. It had all been consumed by a video game; a black hole of personality.

A CT scan was ordered, and they finally had something to work with. A massive infection had invaded my abdomen, turning my blood septic and strangling the organs within. While they still had no idea what could have caused this in an otherwise healthy 21 year old man, at least they knew what to do for me. The ten bags hanging over my head grew to fifteen, “The strongest antibiotics we have” the nurse said. My own blood became a weapon of massive bacterial destruction, carrying out the doctor’s plan of microscopic genocide. It didn’t work immediately, the infection had become so severe that it had colonized itself into pockets in my body that had to be drained. They took giant needles, stabbed them into my chest, and left tubes hanging out of my abdomen that drained into collection bags for microscopic analysis, like a maple tree being tapped for syrup. It took three months of different antibiotics, different needles and different tubes dangling out of my abdomen but slowly and surely I started to come back. When my fever broke, I nearly cried. When I started to walk, I remembered how I thought I would never walk again. When I was able to tolerate food after not eating for weeks I thought about how every single person, from the moment they’re born, takes the ability to eat for granted. Everything I did was with the tepid realization that I was once literally a hair’s width from losing it all. I knew I had to value every waking moment, and I knew I didn’t want to die without anyone to remember I was even here.

As I walked out of the hospital after three months, I was certain I couldn’t go back to mapping in osu!. I wasn’t about to waste any of the time I had been given on a dumb, pointless video game. I still had thousands of people talking about me online every day but when I all but disappeared, only a handful of my close friends were the ones to ask what’s wrong. I realized what osu! Really was to me, a way to artificially inflate the ego that I had neglected for years. While my real life suffered, my osu! Life was thriving.

My real life friends and family had come to visit me in the hospital, but I remembered how I used to ignore their calls to play more osu!. These are the people I should be caring about. While I’ve met several amazing people that I truly consider friends online, my relationship with osu! Was between me and masses of random anime avatars, a black hole of faceless voices and voiceless faces. Osu! Built up this illusion that I was popular and had friends, but the illusion was broken. Being cool to someone I could never meet didn’t matter to me anymore.

I left osu! Behind in that hospital, and almost immediately my life started to change for the better. Over the next year I still kicked ass at school. I started a new job making coffee that left me room to express myself creatively. While I used to spend all my time in my room, I started spending all of my time outside. I would go out on weekends. I would go out to work out. Sometimes I would go out without any reason at all. The more I went out the more people I met, and the more people I met the more people wanted to hang out with me. By summertime just about every hour of every day I was outside, on boats, at parties, meeting people, meeting girls, working hard at things that were important to me and becoming a better person in the process. I ended that summer as the strongest man I had ever been in my entire life. If my life were a PP graph it looked like one of those struggling accounts that suddenly takes 100 top ranks when they turn on the autoplay cheat. I still logged on to osu! Occasionally, and I even still mapped a couple things. But the magic was gone, and I didn’t have the time, it was all taken up by the awesome shit I was doing every day.

The fourth time I thought I was going to die I was leaving the ultrasound clinic last October. I recognized the signs, I remembered the symptoms. My energy was gone again, I couldn’t eat, and I was in unending terrible pain. The doctor that ordered the ultrasound called me up minutes after the fact. “How soon can you get in touch with the people who treated you last year” he asked me sternly. “Well I have a follow up appointment in about a month” I told him. “That’s too late. You need to be seen in an emergency room immediately” and my heart sank. Whatever it was, it was back, and it wanted what it came for the first time. It wanted to put an end to everything I had spent the last year building. It wanted to take happiness and my freedom and everything I held dear.

But there was still the problem, the doctor’s had no idea what ‘It’ was. They had treated the infection, but never found out what caused it in the first place and since I had gotten better, they had little reason to. The ultrasound showed a growth in my mesentery, a part of your abdomen that supplies blood to several important organs. ‘A growth’ can be harmless or it could be one of the most dreaded words in medicine, cancer. I wasn’t about to fuck around with this and if this was a cancer, it was a strange one. I had to be seen by people that know everything there is to know about strange and unusual cancers.

The fifth time I thought I was going to die I was admitted to Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City with a diagnosis of Aggressive Fibromatosis, an extremely rare, often genetic disease that occurs one in a million times in the general population in America. The disease causes growths called ‘desmoid tumors’ that infiltrate, constrict and invade surrounding tissues causing myriad problems. For the past three and a half months I’ve been battling this disease. I’ve been so sick that I had to drop out of school, leave my job and give myself completely to the recovery process. I still haven’t eaten solid food in almost that entire time, and survive only through an enteral feeding tube that the doctor’s placed when I became so dehydrated I nearly passed out walking up the stairs to my room. Even the treatment for this condition has been hell, as after every bi-weekly chemotherapy treatment I feel worse than I did when I went in. Chemo doesn’t just target cancer cells to shrink tumors, it’s a blanket weapon against every cell in your body. You’re basically put in a race, and the doctors hope that the chemo can kill the tumor before it kills you. But even though I’m just as sick, if not worse than the first time, this time is different.

This time I don’t have to wonder if I’ve made a difference in people's lives, I know that's true by the amazing people I’ve met over the past year and the amazing friends I’ve made. This time I don’t have to worry if I wasted time because I’ve taken advantage of every day that’s given to me to become something greater. I don’t need osu! Anymore to tell me I’m great. I’ve tried logging in here and there to see if I can bring back the spark but it’s never the same. I know I am great as a result of the work that I’ve put in to myself as a person, not the illusions I make for myself online. Sure I’m at a roadblock now, but all of this just reinforces what I found to be true over the past year of self discovery. When I’m finally better I’ll never go back to being the person I was before, and I’ll never let anything, be it a video game or cancer, get in the way of becoming the person I want to be.

Here I am officially ending my relationship with osu! and ask.fm You may see me online occasionally and I might even upload something if I’m feeling really particular about a song I love. Please don’t ask me when I’ll be coming back, and please don’t ask me to map or do anything regarding mapping. Feel free to ask me questions, but I will most likely only answer the especially compelling ones.

To everyone that was my friend, fan, or even knew I existed here I want you all to know that you sincerely mean a lot to me. You are all people that witness the potential you have when you devote yourself fully to your goals. You are the reason I have motivation to work everyday to reach them. This is me on February 16th, 2016. I don’t think I’ve ever posted myself here but I no longer have any reason to be ashamed of who I am; sick, mapper or HanzeR.

Goodbye!

http://i.imgur.com/wkqgkwa.jpg