Hello there!
You're probably on this page because you heard somewhere about the crazy
awesome 24-hour old-school EverQuest raiding marathon that Chitiwok Will
be leading and streaming on Friday and Saturday, September 27th and 28th.
Before I let him relay the details, however, I'd like to take a moment to
explain the motivation behind the event, because it means so very much to
me that he is doing this.
You see, almost ten years ago now, I was having a pretty terrible time out there in the real world, and so I spent a lot of time playing EverQuest instead. It was then that I met a Necromancer named Nizzi. Nizzi spent most of his time soloing things he had no business attempting, and trying to figure out the game as if it was a puzzle. He would also run open raids, known as Team Nizzi raids, late at night after our regular raids ended. Nizzi's style of raid leading was far from normal, and he'd often make the tank run around in circles pretending to be feared, or train the raid with another raid mob while they were still fighting the first one, or award the loot to whoever could answer a ridiculous riddle or hand him the most copper pieces.
When I was with the randomness that is Nizzi, my life got better. He knew just what to say to cheer me up. He was smart, funny, and he had a kitten that he kept in his dorm room. He even mailed me a pinata filled with cans of soup. Two months after we first talked online, we met in person, and the two of us plus a small army of cats have been together ever since. Sounds awesome, right? Well, it is.. but if everything was always easy, you'd never truly appreciate the good things in life. So that brings us to today, as I sit in a hospital room watching Nizzi get his second outpatient blood transfusion this week, serenaded by the perpetual beeping of IV machines and his occasional chuckle at whatever's playing on Comedy Central. This is our new normal as of five weeks ago when some abnormal bleeding after a tooth extraction led to an ER visit, a transfer by ambulance to an inpatient cancer center, and a diagnosis of Chronic Myeloid Leukemia.
It's been a whirlwind month trying to learn as much as we can about the disease and what it means for our life going forward. It turns out that treatment for CML was revolutionized only a decade ago, and so now is a much better time to have it than it ever was before. CML is still incurable, but these days you can beat it into submission and hold it there with a super-expensive wonder-drug called a tyrosine-kinase inhibitor that you take for the rest of your life. So thus far, the prognosis is good, and Nizzi is approaching his fight against cancer with the same indefatigable pragmatism as he does everything else - as he says, he could have had it much worse.
Many of the advances in treatments for blood cancers like CML were made possible by research funding from the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, and we are hoping that someday within Justin's lifetime, the research that they continue to fund will actually lead to a real cure. With this in mind, we decided that we wanted to participate in the Light the Night walk held by the LLS and raise money for the organization so that they can continue helping people like us out - not only with providing assistance to researchers, but also for all of the free informational literature they hand out to patients, the support programs they run for patients and their loved ones, the financial assistance they give to people who can't afford their life-saving medications, and their advocacy for the rights of cancer patients throughout the world.
This brings me back, finally, to Chitiwok and his awesome 24-hour raiding marathon. We are hoping to use the event to raise awareness of blood cancers in general (September is blood cancer awareness month!) - because knowledge is power - and also hopefully raise a bit of extra money for LLS via our Light the Night team, for anyone who has been, or will be, touched by cancer in their lives.
So please feel free to join Team Nizzi for 24 hours in any way you can - raid with us, watch us goof around on Twitch, or pass around our message to your friends. Because after all, what's a little leukemia compared with vicious fire-breathing, g-fluxing, spin-stunning, spider-summoning, death-touching monsters? We got this!
-Kyreth