Traumatic Aniversaries

Today is the one year anniversary of me finding out that I had ovarian cancer.  I was sitting on my front porch on a day that was more like the end of summer than the beginning of fall, reading a book and listening to the softball games going on across the street.I took a break from my book and looked at the email that had accumulated over the morning, and there it was, an email from the hospital notifying me that something had been added to my medical record.  I opened it up and read the report of my abdominal CT, which indicated that I had cancer of the ovaries.  So there I was, all alone, my husband in the air flying home and my parents in church, grappling with life changing news.
The good part is that while it was a terrible way to get terrible news, it in no way delayed my care.  I met my oncologist the next day and had surgery that week.  The bad part is that I am not even sure that there was a better way for it to have gone.  And the worst part is that no matter what, you really are pretty all alone in those moments, whether there are people there or not.  It felt devastating at the time, but I am pretty sure that is how it would have been period.
So here I am a year later.  I never got this before my son was diagnosed with cancer, but anniversaries of difficult events become, well, a reliving of the difficult event.  Some of it can be on your mind, like the fact that I am writing about this is the conscious part of it, but there is the unconscious part that is so much harder to grapple with.  How much of what I am feeling and have been feeling is related to the anniversary and how much is just that things are hard?  I really can't tell.  But I do get why people have these anniversary reactions.