This time last year I was sitting with my family in the hospital, waiting to find out if they were going to save my mother's life with a lung transplant. Today, I'm hoping to take her to the beach. It's been a difficult, sometimes heartbreaking year, but she is amazing, and I am so grateful for her persistence, the rock-like support she gets from my father, the values and strength of my whole family, and the skills and intelligence of the surgeons, nurses and doctors. And mostly that she's here.