Anniversary season is hitting differently than I expected–in a good way. Yes, it is overwhelming to be revisiting all the dates of medical procedures and big information, but overwhelming gratitude has been the predominant feeling.

Today is the one-year anniversary of the day I took G back to hospital to begin the staging scans and assessments prior to treatment. By now, he’d had multiple CT and PET scans, an MRI, and a brain biopsy–which is as risky as it sounds. He had been diagnosed with primary CNS lymphoma, all within ten days of me taking him to the hospital, but it was this week coming that they performed further scans–lumbar punctures, ultrasounds, ocular exams and more PET scans–to confirm with certainty that the cancer was only in his brain and not anywhere else in his body (which would have made it secondary CNS lymphoma).

We are four days out from the anniversary of the commencement of his treatment, fifteen days away from the anniversary of him being placed into a coma, and sixteen days from the night they called me to say his organs were failing.

And yet, here we are. One year later. He is outside, pacing, as he speaks to someone from work on the phone. This is typical; he always preferred to stand and move when having conversations in the before times, and nothing has changed. He is working. Not a lot, just a few hours per week, but working nonetheless. This time last year, we assumed treatment would be a linear process. He would go to hospital, have chemo, it would work (or it wouldn’t) and he’d come home. We did not expect nor account for any of the complications he experienced. By the middle of September last year, we weren’t sure he’d ever work–or walk–again.

And yet, here we are. Grateful is an understatement.