Just yesterday,
I was a person.
Today, I am a patient.
Just yesterday, I was a person.
Today, I am a patient.
You are here because you or someone close to you has been diagnosed with cholangiocarcinoma.
ko-LAN-jee-oh-kar-sih-NOH-muh
Bile duct cancer.
A diagnosis like this is disruptive.
It creates urgency, confusion, and pressure all at once.
You do not need to understand everything right now.
You do need a clear, steady starting point.
This page gives you that starting point and the next step in sequence.
You are not expected to navigate this alone.
Think of us as your team.
We are here to help you orient, prioritise, and build an effective response, step by step.
The first goal is simple.
Help you regain control and take the next right step, calmly and without assumption.
This is a response-led place.
Here, action follows clarity and decisions are taken thoughtfully, not reactively.
You will not be rushed.
You will not be overwhelmed with information.
The focus is clear.
Help you understand what matters now and support the steps that move you forward.
Hello.
My name is Steve Holmes. I am a late stage 4 cholangiocarcinoma survivor, and co-founder of this Foundation with my wife, Claire.
I did not plan for this diagnosis either. No one does.
When you arrive here, what you need is more than care.
You need a clear response, taken step by step, with the right support around you.
That is what this Foundation exists to provide.
Not theory. Not slogans. Practical guidance, shaped by lived experience and tested under pressure.
The strength that matters most right now is not confidence or certainty.
It is openness.
A willingness to see clearly, take the next right step, and adjust as you go.
Everything we do here is built on the hard-won knowledge of patients, caregivers, and clinicians who have faced this disease directly and learned what helps.
Our work is supported by a growing community of scientists and researchers who collaborate with us by choice, without compensation, because they understand the edge at which this work operates.
If you choose to move forward with us, you will not be asked to believe anything.
Only to engage, stay grounded, and focus on what helps today.
Although we actively support and help advance health systems and public initiatives, this Foundation receives no government grants or financial support.
For the past eight years, this work has been carried independently by Claire and me, because patients could not wait for systems to catch up.
That personal capacity is now exhausted.
While donations have begun to come in, they are not yet sufficient to sustain this work at the level patients require.
This Foundation exists because behaviour under pressure can be systemised, culture can be engineered, and survival can improve in real time – even after the biological collapse that caused the cancer in the first place.
We close the loop that the diagnosis and treatment process leaves unattended.
Claire and I developed the Foundation’s framework to do exactly that – translating lived survival into systems patients can use in real time.
That loop includes biological cause, lived survival expertise, and recurrence.
By integrating cause and the expertise of lived experience and systemising both into patient response mechanisms, effective response extends across treatment, prevention, and recurrence prevention.
Patients assume these phases are connected and managed.
They are not, and will not be, unless response mechanisms are deliberately built to span causal pathways, effective treatment, and recurrence prevention.
As a patient-led initiative, we design and lead around cause, not speculation.
We do not fund cancer research in the abstract.
The cure is in the cause.
Helping carry this work forward is how prevention becomes real.
Steve
“Just yesterday, I was a person. Today, I am a patient. I must become the best patient I can be, so I can become that person again.” — Stephen A. Gamble-Holmes (Steve)
