ORANGE BEACH, Alabama — A wildfire raged in the woods that connect to the neighborhood where Mo and Jennifer Shaver live in Orange Beach. Neighbors all around were busily trying to make decisions.

What to bring? When to go? If to go at all. What stuff would you want to pack in the car and save if the fire just south of the Sportsplex made its way to Lauder Place and the houses lining its fish-name streets?

A neighbor, Hunter Lanford, the son of Orange Beach Fire Battalion Chief Kevin Lanford, was sent over to put a sprinkler on the Shavers’ roof in case any wind-borne embers landed there.

Someone asked Jennifer what she was going to try to salvage if the fires couldn’t be stopped.

“They were like ‘what are you going to take from your house?’” Jennifer recalled. “I was like ‘you know what? I’m not even going to worry about it.’

“I feel the year we’ve had I could lose everything and as long as Mo’s healthy and the kids are healthy, nothing else here matters.”

At the time of the threatening wildfire, Jennifer was days from delivering their second child and in the middle of a whirlwind year that would test the family’s mettle and show them just how special the community where they live really is.

In early March 31-year-old Mo Shaver, owner of Mo Fishin’ tackle shop and several charter fishing boats, suffered a seizure that was quickly diagnosed as a brain tumor. It was determined to be cancerous and had to be removed.

Thus began the tumult that seems surreal as Christmas and the end of 2011 loom.

Are the Shavers looking forward to Christmas?

“Every day is a good day in our world,” Mo says. “This year has kind of rearranged life. It’s easy to get things reprioritized.”

The underlying theme of the year has been Mo’s cancer battle. It has ranged from a dire diagnosis of just a few weeks to live to a remarkable response of the community to his wife’s perseverance to pursue and find second and third opinions to Mo’s current remission.

“When I tell the story I feel like I’m making it up,” Jennifer said. “It just sounds so outrageous.”

But those aren’t the only things to make this an incredible year for the Shavers.

Following the wildfire of July Fourth weekend, Jennifer’s doctors decided to induce her labor on July 11 instead of July 19 because Mo was expecting results of a much-anticipated MRI that week. It was to determine if there was further growth where the tumor was removed.

Her doctor wanted the pregnancy behind them before those results were known.

Good thing. On the morning of July 19, her original due date, Jennifer woke up with a ruptured appendix.

“We were like ‘what hurricane have we got to deal with now?’” Mo said with a grin. “They know us well at the hospital.”

On the first hospital stay, soon after Mo’s surgery, came the worst news possible. Post-surgery swelling was at first determined to be a regrowth of the cancer. Jennifer, four or five months pregnant already, began her quest to learn all she could about her husband’s cancer.

“I think the best advice someone told me was doctors aren’t God,” she said. “If you don’t get the answer you want, you have to have faith that someone else will have another opinion, or there’s something else you can do.”

The first step was a second opinion.

“We could’ve given up and we could have come home and he probably would have died within a few weeks because the swelling was so bad,” she said.

But the “regrowth” was just that. Swelling.

“Thank God for the doctors that we had that wanted us and helped push us to get a second opinion,” Jennifer said. “They were so helpful and so supportive. Without them Mo probably wouldn’t be here.”

But the battle was hardly over. Now the Shavers visit a bevy of doctors on a regular basis.

“We have a great team,” Jennifer says.

Mo takes chemotherapy medicines the first five days of every month. Since the surgery he has had about a half dozen seizures, including one recently as the family was putting put up the Christmas tree.

“So I spent a couple of days in the hospital last week,” Mo says sheepishly.

“They say that anytime you have that kind of trauma to your head, your body will continue to have seizures,” Jennifer said. “He’ll probably be on seizure meds forever.”

Perhaps the biggest impression on the Shaver family has been the outpouring of support from neighbors, both on Tarpon Street and Orange Beach as a whole.

On a recent Thursday afternoon, a visitor knocked on the wrong door looking for the Shaver house. Laura Blair answered the door and pointed to the next driveway.

Blair was wearing an orange “Fishing for Miracles” T-shirt from one of the many fundraisers for the family last spring.

“We all have (cancer),” Jennifer said. “All of us deal with it. And all of us support Mo in this. It’s not just his.

“People have been so incredible and so kind. And businesses raised money for us and had fundraisers. You would never imagine you’d be in these shoes. People have been just incredible — our community, our neighborhood.

“There’s no way we could ever pay everybody back.”

Mo likes to go back to a word he’s come to use more and more since this journey began on March 3.

“You really do reprioritize,” he said. “It makes you look and go ‘I have an incredible wife and two incredible children and incredible neighbors and community.’

“We’re blessed to have people like we have that are willing to help you and want to help you and be involved in your life. This is a really nice and unique community.”