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The phone call. The follow-up. The appointment where someone you have only just met says the word out loud. From that moment, time bends. The first ninety days after a cancer diagnosis are unlike anything else, and almost nobody prepares you for them.

You are expected to process the news, organise a medical plan, manage your family, your work, your own mind. All of it before you have caught your breath.

The medical team will tell you about the protocol. They will be clear, careful, kind. What they often cannot give you is time. The appointments are meant for clinical decisions, and the rest of it, the parts that wake you at three in the morning, has nowhere to go.

What I tell people in the first weeks

Slow down where you can. Not the treatment, that has its own pace. Slow down the rest. The decisions about what to tell whom, when, how. The decisions about work. The decisions about what kind of patient you want to be. These do not have to be made in the first week.

Pick the small number of people you genuinely trust to know everything. Tell them. Let the wider circle find out as it does. Trying to manage everyone's feelings on top of your own is one of the fastest routes to exhaustion.

Write your questions down before each appointment. Take someone with you who is willing to be quiet and listen. Their job is not to comfort you in the room. It is to remember what was said.

What coaching looks like in this period

This is where coaching alongside your oncology care earns its place. We do not duplicate what your medical team does. We talk about how you are sleeping, eating, moving, thinking. About what you want to ask at the next appointment. About the conversations at home that have not happened yet. About who you are becoming through all this, and who you want to be on the other side.

It is small, steady work. Done weekly or fortnightly, it adds up.

The parts no one will mention

People around you will get strange. Some will come close. Some will pull away because they do not know what to say. This is not personal, though it feels personal. It is the most common pattern in the world, and it is one of the lonelier parts of being ill.

You will be praised for being strong, and you will resent it on the days you do not feel strong. You will be told to stay positive, by people who would not know where to start if it were them. Take what is useful. Leave the rest.

And on the very bad days, when nothing helps, the only honest advice is this: you do not have to be okay today. Tomorrow is its own day.

If you are reading this

If you are in your first ninety days, or someone you love is, I would be glad to talk. The first conversation costs nothing and there is no obligation to continue. Sometimes one honest conversation with someone outside the situation is enough to take the weight off, even for an afternoon.

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Integrative oncology is one of those phrases that means different things to different people. To some it sounds like a soft alternative to medicine. To others it sounds like an expensive add-on. Both are wrong.

Integrative oncology is the bit of cancer care that sits alongside your medical treatment and asks how the rest of you is doing. Sleep, nutrition, movement, mental load, the work of living through it. It does not replace chemotherapy, radiotherapy, surgery, or immunotherapy. It supports the person going through them.

What the research says, in plain language

Cancer outcomes are not only about the protocol. They are also about how the person copes with treatment, whether they sleep, whether they eat well enough, whether they have the kind of support that makes them ask questions and turn up to appointments. The Society for Integrative Oncology and similar bodies in the UK and continental Europe have spent years building the evidence base for this.

Coaching alongside oncology is not a cure. It is the part of care that helps the person live well through treatment, recover with more of themselves intact, and stay on top of the things that sit outside the clinic, in your daily life.

What it looks like in practice with me

We meet weekly or fortnightly, online. Sessions are an hour. We talk about what is happening in your week. What is hard, what is working, what is coming up that you are worried about. I am not your therapist. I am not your doctor. I am the person who walks with you between appointments and after them.

We work on practical things: sleep routines that fit your life during treatment, the conversations at home that need to happen, the questions you want to bring to your next oncology appointment. And we work on the harder things: who you are becoming, what you want on the other side of this, how to hold on to yourself when illness wants to define you.

How it fits with your medical team

I work in collaboration with Dr Waleed Mohammed, Consultant Clinical Oncologist at Oncogenix Care in London, who specialises in lung cancer, mesothelioma, brain and spinal tumours, thymic tumours, and secondary cancers. That collaboration matters. It means I know where my work ends and his begins. Anything medical, I refer back. Anything that needs a specialist, I refer back. My job is the wide territory that is not medical but absolutely affects how you go through this.

If you are in active treatment and curious about whether this would help, the first conversation is free. We will work out together whether it is the right fit.

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Treatment ends. The last session, the last appointment, the conversation that closes one door even as it leaves a thousand questions open. Maybe a small celebration. Maybe you rang the bell after your last treatment to mark the end. Everyone around you expects you to feel relief. Back to normal life.

And instead, for many people, the months after treatment are the hardest of all.

This is one of the most consistent patterns in cancer recovery and one of the least discussed. The medical literature has been clear for years that the period after active treatment is often where the wheels come off emotionally. The protocol that gave your life its shape is over. The appointments are further apart. The fear of recurrence sits in the background, and the people around you have moved on.

What is going on

Through treatment, you were a patient. You had a role. You had a team. You had a calendar that told you what to do. When that ends, the role ends with it, and what is left is a person trying to work out who they are now.

Add to that the physical reality. Fatigue that lingers. A body that does not quite feel like yours. Maybe long-term side effects you are still learning to live with. The temptation to push through and pretend you are fine is enormous, because everyone else thinks you should be.

What helps

Naming it helps. Telling someone, including yourself, that this part is hard and that it is meant to be hard. The relief alone is worth a great deal.

Slow rebuilding helps. Not the heroic version. The boring one. Sleep, rest, gentle movement, the small daily things that put you back in touch with your own body. Coaching at this stage is often about pacing. About not overcommitting in an effort to prove you are back. About listening to what your body and mind are asking for, rather than what other people expect.

And purpose helps, eventually. Not in a heroic way. In a small, honest way. What do you want now, knowing what you know? The question is uncomfortable at first. It also turns out to be a doorway.

If you are in this part

You are not failing recovery. You are doing the part of it that nobody talks about often enough. The first conversation costs nothing, and sometimes that is where the next chapter begins.