Scan

 The weeks leading up to your child’s scan are a kind of quiet storm.

From the outside, life looks almost normal. School runs still happen. Dinners still get made. Conversations still fill the house. But underneath it all, there’s a constant hum , a tension that never quite switches off. It sits in your chest, in your thoughts, in the silence when the house finally goes to sleep… except you don’t.

Sleep becomes a stranger in those weeks. You lie awake replaying everything. Every small symptom. Every “what if.” Every memory you wish you could forget but somehow feels sharper than ever. Your mind doesn’t rest it spirals. You tell yourself to be positive, to stay grounded, but anxiety doesn’t listen to logic. It just exists. Loud and persistent.

The truth is, the anxiety is real. Deeply real. And it doesn’t matter how much time has passed.

This was the time, three years ago,  when everything changed. When the word “tumour” entered your life in a way we could never have prepared for. When our world stopped, tilted, and then started again in a completely different shape.

A brain tumour diagnosis doesn’t just arrive and leave quietly. It reshapes everything. It changes how you see time, how you measure joy, how you hold fear. Even now, three years on, that imprint remains. Certain dates, certain smells, certain feelings in the air,  they take you right back there in an instant.

And then there’s this year.

One year on from chemo.

A milestone that should feel like solid ground. A marker of distance from the hardest days. And yet, here we are again, facing a scan at almost the same time of year. The overlap is hard to ignore. It stirs something deep mix of gratitude, fear, disbelief. 

That’s the part people don’t always see. The after isn’t simple. The after carries echoes.

But within all of that… there is Zack.

Zack, who has walked through more than most ever will. Zack, who has faced fear head-on without fully understanding its weight, yet somehow carried it anyway. Zack, who has adapted, grown, and found his way forward in a life that asked so much of him so early.

Three years on, his strength isn’t just something you admire, it’s something that humbles you.

He is amazing. Not in the way people casually say it, but in a way that is built from resilience, from courage, from the quiet determination to keep going. He laughs, he lives, he finds joy — and in doing so, he reminds you what matters most.

Life has changed in so many ways. It will never be what it was before, and maybe that’s something we've had to grieve in our own time. But it has also become something deeper. More aware. More appreciative of the ordinary moments that once passed unnoticed.

The anxiety before scans may never fully disappear. Maybe it isn’t supposed to. Maybe it’s just part of loving someone this fiercely.

But alongside that fear, there is also this:

Hope.

Strength.

And a little boy who has already proven just how much he can overcome.

And somehow, that helps you breathe again.