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# The Waiting Room
- URL: https://soul-harbor-therapies.ghost.io/the-waiting-room/
- Published: 2026-08-01T15:13:51.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-01T15:13:51.000Z
- Author: Andrea Robertson-Begg

**Several Years of Oncology, Palliative Care, and Finding Stillness**

Today we sat in the Combined Day Unit, waiting to see the oncologist.

Waiting rooms are uncompromising places. On the surface they are simply functional spaces with rows of chairs, fluorescent lighting, and notices on the walls. But beneath that ordinariness rests something deeper and far heavier. They are holding spaces for fear, hope, uncertainty, grief, endurance, and love. All quietly resting beside one another, unannounced.

In the furthest corner from where we sat was a stainless-steel fan, sweeping rhythmically from side to side. Its steady hum was reassuring, the kind of white noise that invites sleep and softens the harder edges of a room. It muted the squeak of trainers on lino, the shifting of bodies in purple and pink faux leather chairs, polite coughs and unexpected sneezes, the murmur of voices, the flutter of loose paper. A small mercy, that hum. Something ordinary to calm and cool.

There were fourteen of us waiting, the number shifting as the morning wore on. Some early birds had been there since the doors opened, fretting that they’d been forgotten, missed off the list for the day. Others arrived just in time and were whisked away almost immediately, a small, unfair contrast to the draining of time for those left behind.

There were patients and carers. Couples sitting shoulder to shoulder, locked into their mobile screens or staring down the corridor. Small children accompanying a poorly parent, restless in a room built for adults coping with their fear. There were people alone (oddly, mainly women, today) sitting upright, composed, giving nothing away. For the bulk of that time, the fourteen lives in that room were gathered by circumstance, each carrying a story known only to themselves, and yet, somehow, recognisable to everyone else in the room. We didn’t need the details. We knew and understood the shape of it.

The room was brightly lit. It was the kind of lighting that hurts tired eyes and casts unforgiving shadows, exposing every wrinkle, every bruise, every sign that life has been lived and is, right now, being fought for. There was nowhere to hide under that fluorescent light. Cancer does not get to be private here, however much we might want it to be.

The Lavazza machine was still out of order, exactly as it had been a week ago, an engineer tending to its beeps and electronic groans. A small detail, perhaps, but irritatingly reassuring too. Life goes on, machines break down, and a bad coffee machine becomes one more thing outside our personal control, added quietly to a much longer list.

Some people wore coats despite the room resting at twenty-four degrees. One woman had sheepskin boots pulled snugly round her numb feet. Chemotherapy rearranges the body’s relationship with temperature, with comfort and with certainty. One more invisible cost that no one outside this room would think to ask about, or would understand.

In the opposite corner, a television burbled to no one in particular.

*“The fire was started by a disposable barbecue…”*

*“He was arrested at home…”*

*“Denying any responsibility…”*

*“This terraced house…” “Sold for £75,000 at auction…”*

Fragments of outrage drifted through the room from another world entirely. A world where disposable barbecues still felt like the worst thing that could happen on a given day, where arrests were made and houses sold. Here, most of us were occupied by something that made that outrage feel almost tender in its innocence.

The carers fascinated me, the way they always do.

They sat patiently beside the people they loved, carrying burdens of their own that had nowhere to go. Worries folded neatly away, tucked into back pockets, out of sight. Tears postponed until the car park, or later, or never. Questions left unspoken, because there is only so much room in one person for fear before it starts to spill over. So often carers become guardians not only of appointments and paperwork, but of emotional weight, quietly absorbing what their loved one cannot also be asked to hold. No one calls their name. No one asks how they are managing. And yet they are managing the scaffolding.

Then a name is called.

Patient and carer stand together. A brief glance exchanged. Reassurance, or apprehension, or both at once, indistinguishable in that half-second. Then the shuffle towards the commanding voice, through a door that closes on a transitory conversation that the rest of us will never hear the outcome of.

**The Oddity of This Kind of Waiting**

There is something particular about an oncology waiting room that sets it apart from almost every other kind of waiting.

Most waiting rooms hold people who have chosen to be there, in some sense. A dentist’s chair. A hairdresser’s mirror. Even a GP surgery carries some element of the elective (a decision made, an appointment booked because something felt worth checking). This room is not that. No one here is waiting by choice. No one is waiting for something they asked for in the way you ask for a haircut, or a filling. They are waiting because their body forced the appointment into being, and now there is no version of a normal Tuesday or Wednesday, which does not run through this room first.

Some of the fourteen were here for curative treatment, walking the fixed, gruelling road toward an end point they could at least name. Others were here for something gentler in its language and much harder in its truth. Palliative care, where the aim is no longer to cure but to hold: to manage pain, to extend time, to make whatever time remains as liveable as possible. You cannot always tell, from the outside, which path someone is walking towards. The waiting looks the same. The fear wears the same coat.

And for so many in that room, this was not a single visit but one more turn of a wheel they know intimately well. Cycle after cycle. Scan, treatment, recovery, scan again. Each cycle asking the body to survive the medicine meant to save it. Each round of options a little narrower than the last. Not because anyone gave up, but because that is simply the shape treatment often takes. First-line. Second-line. Third. The vocabulary itself tells the story, quietly, without anyone having to say it out loud.

There is a particular kind of hope carried by people waiting for a scan result: the hope of hearing the words *no evidence of disease*. NED, as it’s known on the wards. And there is a particular kind of grief carried by people who have heard those words before, sometimes years before, and built a life cautiously back up around themselves. A holiday booked. A grandchild’s future imagined. A sense of *after* finally allowed back in. Only for that new normal to be dashed weeks, months or years later by a follow-up scan that finds what everyone had quietly hoped was gone for good. NED is not the same as cured. Everyone in this room, on some level, knows that. And still, they hope for it, because what else is there to hope for, in a room like this, except the best available outcome?

Treatment itself has changed almost beyond recognition, even within a single patient’s lifetime of appointments. Protocols shift. Drugs once considered a last resort become first-line. Others fall away, quietly retired. People who were told, years ago, that they had months, are still here, still waiting in rooms like this one, because the science moved faster than the prognosis did. That is its own strange grief and its own strange miracle, sometimes held in the same body.

And there is another kind of waiting threaded through all of it. Waiting for research to catch up. For the next clinical trial. The next combination. The next small percentage shift in a survival curve that might, for someone in this room, be the difference that matters. Somewhere behind the keypad door, research keeps moving. New drugs. New combinations. New trials. People who were once told they had months are still sitting in rooms like this one because science refused to stand still.

A year ago, someone had erected a wishing tree in one corner. An autumn-coloured tree, its leaves carrying handwritten hopes, prayers, small offerings of encouragement. It has stood there ever since, slightly faded now, still doing its quiet work. A reminder that even in a room built around clinical necessity, people still reach for ritual and shared compassion, somewhere to put the things they cannot say aloud.

A nurse rushes past, her papers fluttering, glancing down to check it’s the right one clutched in her hand. Another moves briskly down the corridor, with energy to spare, footsteps quick and sure, a kind of ease none of us waiting could quite remember ever having. There is never enough time in a place like this, not for the staff, who are stretched thinner than anyone acknowledges, and not for us, waiting, watching the clock with a kind of held breath. And yet, in the middle of that pressure, there is still kindness. Small, easily missed acts that mean everything to the person receiving them. A hand briefly touching a shoulder. A name remembered. A joke, gently offered, at exactly the right moment.

A security keypad beeps periodically, admitting staff through a door that seems to swallow them up. People disappear through it and don’t seem to reappear. I found myself wondering, as I often do in places like this: *where do they go*? It is such a small question, and yet it holds something larger. It’s about what happens beyond that door, beyond what we are allowed to witness, beyond the waiting.

The waiting room revealed vulnerability in ways that felt almost too intimate to look at directly. Scarves loosely tied. Heads bent forward. Fragile necks exposed where hair had once offered protection. Dark, purple bruises. The physical facts of illness laid bare under lights that give nothing back. No fog filter. No soft music in the background as the camera cuts to a different angle, a thoughtful gaze into the distance.

You could almost read whole relationship histories across the room, if you let yourself. The husband who reaches out, without thinking, for his wife’s handbag before she has even asked. The daughter checking her father’s appointment letter for the third time, as though checking it again might change what it says. The solitary patient scrolling silently through a phone, facing whatever news lay ahead entirely alone, by choice or circumstance?

This is where decisions are made. Where life-changing conversations take place behind a door with a keypad. Where tears are wiped away before anyone else can see them fall. Where pain is endured, quietly, because there is no alternative. Where bad news arrives, and good news, when it comes, is received like something almost too fragile to hold. Where people discover reserves of strength they did not know they had, because the day required it of them and there was no one else to ask.

And where hope remains the one ingredient that never quite runs out, even when everything else in the room feels rationed.

**A Small Anchor: Meditation and Mudra in the Waiting**

Over the years of sitting in rooms like this one, I have learned that you cannot control the wait, the lighting, the coffee machine, or the verdict behind the door. But you can, sometimes, find one small thing that belongs to you alone in the room.

For me, that has become a quiet practice of breath and mudra. Something small enough to do in a chair, in public, without anyone noticing. Nothing that asks the room to look at you. Nothing that requires closing your eyes for very long or removing yourself from where you are. Just a hand, resting in the lap, doing something deliberate while everything else waits.

I use **Prana Mudra**: the tips of the thumb, ring finger, and little finger brought gently together, the other two fingers extended, resting loosely on the knee or in the lap. In yogic tradition, it is known as the mudra of life force, said to restore energy and steady the nervous system when it has been worn thin by waiting, by fear, by the sheer effort of holding still while so much feels un-held. A small ritual that gives the hands something to do while the mind does something harder.

Alongside it, I slow my breath: in for a count of four, hold for a brief pause, out for a count of six. The longer exhale does its own gentle work on the nervous system, coaxing the body down out of high alert, even for a minute or two, even in a room with a burbling television and a broken coffee machine. Other times, I’ll use **Gyan Mudra** instead: thumb and index finger touching, the traditional gesture of calm attention. The mudra itself matters less than the act of choosing something, anywhere, on a day when almost nothing else is yours to choose.

It doesn’t fix the wait. It doesn’t change what is behind the door. But it gives the body a small, private place to rest while everything else in the room keeps happening around it.

As I waited, my eyes settled on a *Derby Stoma Buddies* poster, half obscured by another notice that had slipped sideways and now flapped gently in the breeze of the fan.

A small, unremarkable thing. Posters need refreshing. Coffee machines need repairing. People need caring for, in ways both enormous and painfully small. I made a mental note to bring updated posters next time, a modest, practical offering, but an offering nonetheless.

It felt like such a small thing to do.

But perhaps that is exactly what holds a room like this together: not the grand gestures, but the countless small acts of care, offered again and again, in the midst of so much that cannot be controlled. The fan still turning in its corner. The tree of wishes, slightly faded, still standing. A poster, waiting to be noticed and put right.

We do not get to choose the waiting. But we can choose, in small ways, to tend to it.

© Soul Harbor Therapies, all rights reserved, Andrea Robertson-Begg July 2026

**Further Reading**

Some words and ideas in this piece carry more weight than a single sentence can hold. For anyone sitting in a waiting room of their own tonight, or wanting to understand one a little better, here is where I went looking.

**On the words themselves** *No evidence of disease* is not the same as *cured*, and it took me a while to understand why the distinction matters so much to the people carrying it. — [Cancer Remission, NED, Cancer-Free: What the Terms Mean](https://www.cancercenter.com/community/blog/2023/04/cancer-remission-ned-cancer-free?ref=soul-harbor-therapies.ghost.io) — [MD Anderson: Remission, cancer-free, no evidence of disease — what’s the difference?](https://www.mdanderson.org/cancerwise/remission--cancer-free--no-evidence-of-disease--what-is-the-difference-when-talking-about-cancer-treatment-effectiveness-and-results.h00-159460845.html?ref=soul-harbor-therapies.ghost.io)

**On palliative care, and the misunderstanding that follows it into every room** Palliative is not a synonym for the end. It can begin the day after diagnosis and sit alongside curative treatment for years. I wish more of us knew that before we needed to. — [Marie Curie: What is palliative care?](https://www.mariecurie.org.uk/information/getting-care/palliative-care?ref=soul-harbor-therapies.ghost.io)

**On the science that is, slowly, changing the shape of the wait** Somewhere beyond that keypad door, research keeps moving, even on the days it doesn’t feel like it. Artificial intelligence is now helping match patients to trials they would once have missed entirely — only around 7 in 100 oncology patients currently make it into a trial at all, which tells you how much room there still is to close that gap. — [AI for clinical trials in oncology](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2949820125005478?ref=soul-harbor-therapies.ghost.io) — [AI in Oncology Clinical Research: Accelerating Patient Matching for Trials](https://acrpnet.org/2026/02/09/ai-in-oncology-clinical-research-accelerating-patient-matching-for-trials?ref=soul-harbor-therapies.ghost.io) — [AI and MRD Take Center Stage on Day 2 of ASCO Breakthrough 2026](https://www.cancernetwork.com/view/ai-and-mrd-take-center-stage-on-day-2-of-asco-breakthrough-2026?ref=soul-harbor-therapies.ghost.io)

**On the carers, who so rarely get their names called** Up to seven in ten cancer carers experience anxiety, stress or depression brought on by caring itself. More than half receive no additional support at all. If that describes you, please know the noticing goes both ways. — [Macmillan: Emotional support for cancer carers](https://www.macmillan.org.uk/cancer-information-and-support/supporting-someone/emotional-support-for-carers?ref=soul-harbor-therapies.ghost.io) — [Macmillan Cancer Support warn of strain on carers](https://ecancer.org/en/news/10132-macmillan-cancer-support-warn-of-strain-on-sandwich-generation-of-carers?ref=soul-harbor-therapies.ghost.io)

**On the breath itself** There is real physiology behind why a slower exhale steadies a racing heart — the vagus nerve doing quietly, in a plastic chair, what it has always done. — [The effect of slow breathing in regulating anxiety, *Scientific Reports*](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-92017-5?ref=soul-harbor-therapies.ghost.io)

*Prana Mudra and Gyan Mudra come from a much older, less footnoted lineage — yogic tradition rather than clinical literature. I offer them here the same way they were offered to me: not as treatment, but as ritual. Something for the hands to do while the rest of you waits.*

*If this piece met you in a waiting room of your own, Soul Harbor Therapies offers accompaniment — not answers — for illness, caregiving, and the long, uncertain middle between appointments.*