When I was diagnosed with cancer, I thought I knew what the hardest part would be. It was not the treatment. It was not the side effects, though those were brutal. It was the isolation of feeling like no one around me understood what I was going through, even the people who loved me most.
The scale of this experience is larger than most people realize. National Cancer Institute projections estimate 2,114,850 new cancer cases in the United States in 2026. And the population living with cancer is growing. The NCI estimates 18.6 million cancer survivors in 2025, projected to reach 26 million by 2040. Every one of those people is navigating something the medical system treats primarily as a physical problem.
I want to name what that something is. Cancer does not just affect the body. It affects your sense of self, your relationships, your ability to parent, your capacity to work, your willingness to plan for a future you are no longer sure exists. It produces fear, anger, grief, and exhaustion, and those emotions do not resolve on the schedule of a treatment plan. They sit with you, sometimes for years.
What made it worse, in my case, was that the people closest to me could not fully understand. They wanted to. They sat with me. They cried with me. But they had not woken up every day with cancer. They did not know what it was like to feel your body betray you, the effect it has on your mental health, to wonder whether this would be the scan that changed everything. And I did not want to burden them with the full weight of what I was carrying. So I held it in.
I tried to find help through the channels that were available. I started therapy over the phone, because I was too sick to leave the house. I took a mindfulness class. I reached out to my oncologist when the depression became too much to manage alone. They said someone would call me. No one ever called. That experience taught me something that has stayed with me. The support systems that exist on paper are not always there in practice, and when you are already exhausted, chasing them down is its own kind of work.
Then COVID arrived. If you were on chemotherapy or immunosuppressive drugs, the isolation of those years was not an inconvenience. It was a medical necessity, and it made an already lonely experience lonelier. I had moved back to my hometown hoping to start a support group. Instead, I found myself more isolated than ever.
A dear friend suggested I try a Zoom group instead. I had no marketing budget, no infrastructure, no plan. I put the word out online, and a couple of social workers passed it along, and people came. The first session had two attendees. I remember thinking, if no one had come, I probably would have given up. But someone did. Dolores did, and she and I became very close. She sadly passed away from cancer. However, her memory lives on as a reminder of how important that first interaction was for me. More people kept coming. The group grew, organically, into what is now RISE.
Clinical Care and Peer Support Are Parallel Needs
What I learned from building that community is that the emotional support people need is not a supplement to medical care. It is a parallel need. When you sit in a room, virtual or otherwise, with people who have also woken up with cancer, you do not have to explain yourself. You do not have to soften what you are feeling so that the people who love you are not frightened. You can say what is actually true. And in that space, something begins to shift.
I want to be careful here. I am not saying that community cures anything. I am saying that community makes the thing you are living with survivable in a way that isolation does not. There is a difference between being alone and feeling alone, and the second is often harder to fix. A support group does not replace a doctor. It does not replace a therapist. It does not replace medication. But it does something the clinical system is not designed to do, which is to remind you that you are not the only person who has ever felt this way.
The other lesson I learned, and the one I would most want the reader to take away, is that you do not have to wait for life to return to normal before you are allowed to find joy. I spent the early years of my illness believing that if I could just get through treatment, everything would go back to how it was. It did not. My cancer spread to stage four within six months. There was no going back to normal. There was only the life I had now, and the question of what to do with it.
I am not always happy. I have days when the fear and the exhaustion win. But I have learned that joy does not require a cleared scan or a finished treatment plan. It can exist alongside fear. It can exist in a shared meal, a phone call, a moment of laughter with people who understand. You can find it. You can make it.
If you are living with a serious illness, or if someone you love is, I want you to know that the emotional side of this is not optional. It is not a luxury. It is part of what it takes to keep going. Find the people who understand. If you cannot find them, build something. That is what I did, and it gave me back a life I could actually live.
Carrie Danny is founder and vice president of RISE, a nonprofit providing support groups and retreats, and has lived with stage-four cancer for nearly a decade.
All opinions are the author’s own.