Patricia's reflections on the Yes to Life Conference and 30 years of learning how to be with people in their fear.

“The great art of life is sensation, to feel that we exist, even in pain.”— Lord Byron

Saturday I attended the Yes to Life conference in London. Its theme, Reclaiming Our True Nature, felt less like a conference title and more like a summary of the question I have been living with for thirty years: how do we truly help someone when they are frightened for their life?

Where I started

When I first began working in oncology, I looked for answers in the physical: treatments, side effects, nutrition, supplements, the many ways we might support the body. There was so much to learn, and I believed that the right information, offered clearly, would ease people’s fear.

Sometimes it did. Often it didn’t.

Over the years, I sat with people who had every option laid out in front of them and still could not breathe for fear. I learnt, slowly and sometimes painfully, that I had been answering the wrong question. People weren’t only asking what should I do? They were asking how do I survive this feeling?

The trauma no one names

We rarely call a cancer diagnosis a trauma, but that is what it so often is.

In a single conversation, the ground disappears. The body you trusted has turned against you. The future you assumed you had is suddenly in question. You are handed a new language of scans, markers, stages and statistics, and asked to make some of the most important decisions of your life at the very moment you feel least able to think.

Then the waiting begins. Waiting for results, for appointments, for the next scan. The fear doesn’t stay in the consulting room; it follows you home and wakes you at 3am. Many people describe feeling like a stranger in their own life, watching the people they love struggle to know what to say, and hiding their own terror to protect them.

And the trauma doesn’t end when treatment does. For many, the end of treatment is when the fear finally surfaces, as the structure of hospital care falls away and they are left alone with the question: what now, and will it come back?

For those living with advanced cancer, this is not a chapter. It is daily life.

Yet emotional distress is still too often treated as something to deal with later, once the “real” business of treatment is done. For many people, that moment never comes.

What thirty years have taught me

I have tried many ways of helping people under this kind of stress. Some helped. Some, I now realise, added to the burden. I learnt that telling someone to “stay positive” can leave them feeling they are failing at yet another thing, and quietly responsible for their own illness. The science does not support that burden, and no one should carry it.

I learnt that reassurance, however kindly meant, can shut down the very feelings that need to be heard. And I learnt that the most healing thing is often the simplest and hardest: to stay present with someone in their fear, without rushing to fix it. To let them feel that what they are experiencing makes sense, and that they are not alone in it.

From there, something shifts. When people feel safe enough to acknowledge what they feel, they can begin to think again, to recognise what they need, and to reclaim a sense of agency in a situation that has taken so much from them.

We now understand more about how the nervous system, hormones and immune system respond to chronic stress, isolation and a lack of safety. This doesn’t mean emotions cause cancer, or that calm guarantees recovery. But it does mean that how a person feels, and how supported they are, matters to their whole experience of illness. It deserves the same care we give to the body.

Down the rabbit hole

This is why Alice in Cancerland means so much to me.

Alice falls into a bewildering world where the rules no longer apply, the instructions contradict each other, and she is constantly asked to adapt to things she could never have anticipated. Anyone who has been diagnosed with cancer knows that feeling.

But Alice’s story is also one of finding herself. She questions, she navigates, and she gradually discovers who she is in that strange new place.

That, I have come to believe, is the heart of it. Not only learning to navigate the medical system, but staying connected to yourself while you do.

Why emotional health is now at the centre

I began Cancer Options to help people understand their options. That still matters. But thirty years have shown me that information alone does not calm a frightened nervous system.

So emotional health is now at the centre of this work: helping people understand their responses to cancer, reconnect with their bodies, restore a sense of safety, and find what genuinely supports them. It took me quite some time to realise this is not an add on but the centre of the whole process. That is what I have worked on, beginning and returning there to ground and deal with trauma.

From surviving to living

The Yes to Life conference reflected a change many patients and practitioners have long felt: that illness cannot be separated from the experience of being human, and that care must honour both the science of medicine and the art of human connection.

My work has come full circle. I began by wanting to help people understand their options. I now want, just as much, to help them feel less alone in their fear, and to find their way back to themselves.

Perhaps that is what reclaiming our true nature means. Not becoming someone new, or meeting yet another expectation of how to “do” cancer, but finding the person who was there before the diagnosis, and perhaps discovering parts of ourselves we never knew

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