2012 Irish Korean Essay Competition - Anniversaries

Anniversaries: Milestones in My Personal History of Struggles Recalling my elementary school time, I was such a boy who loved to run and play with mates. I rarely paid attention to what teachers were saying during class, and rather chatted and exchanged letters with best friends of mine. Whenever the day of sports competition came, I always ran the two-track-around relay match as a representative of the class team. Practicing for the match after school in the upcoming weeks before the competition was an utmost enjoyment. Outcomes and rankings of my team on the competitions did not matter as what mattered to me was the time I could share and hang out with my friends – not because we never won the match! Like every good thing comes to an end, however, the bright and vigorous childhood part of mine was calling to an end. It was then when the pivot on which my world had been turning was irrevocably changed.

Around the time when I turned 11, I noticed something unusual and unthinkable had happened to me. I used to go for a walk up to a hill near my place every morning. Then I loved galloping down the path leading to the way home. One day, I was with my grandmother and two cousins. Several minutes after letting them go down the path before me as always, I started to run. It was then for the first time in my life, I just knew that my legs would not support my body. It felt my knees bending weakly losing strength. So I stopped, and started to walk down the road as awkwardly as the situation seemed to me. This scary and bizarre experience was only the beginning.

As I was running the last relay competition of the year, I collapsed before the finish line. I was taken to hospital nearby. Not long after, I was moved to a bigger one, and had to go through an intensified medical checkup. Myasthenia gravis – that was the name of the disease I was diagnosed with. This disease is characterized by a feeling weakness in the entire body, due to interference with the nervous system, which delivers orders from the brain to the muscles all across the body. Being only 12, I understood less than half of what the doctor had said. I didn’t know what the name of the disease actually meant. The situation got bad to worse at an alarming speed. Several months later, I found myself struggling to climb up to the next floor.

Sometimes it took me several minutes to become fully ‘recharged’ to step up a stair.

Accordingly, I was losing confidence in myself. It didn’t take long for a once sociable