Steve shares his knowledge, experience, and wisdom to help better equip and empower your capacity to mount a robust and effective response to a serious challenge.

steveHOLMES
My brother and I were diagnosed with the same aggressive terminal cancer, with 6 months to live
I survived. Graeme did not.
My survival became part of a modern-day medical breakthrough — revealing a new pathway for how patients can respond to, and survive, even from the most serious of late-stage settings.
Surviving stage IV terminal cancer is remarkable in itself. It attracts attention — and with it, an unexpected responsibility.
Cancer patients suffer a lot.
That’s what it is to be a patient.
So anything I can do to reduce that suffering — to make life more liveable — is a good thing. A meaningful thing.
Sharing my battle-earned knowledge does exactly that.
It shines a light on what’s possible.
my walk with CHOLANGIO
Diagnosed with distal extrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma —the worst of CCA and GI survival rates generally.
25 hours of multi-organ surgery, including a near-fatal post op hepatic artery aneurysm, at home with just minutes to spare.
But the cancer returned — fast, aggressive, widespread metastases across my liver and lungs. Too many to count.
Now late-stage, stage IV, with weeks — if not days — to live…
A LAST-MINUTE HAIL MARY PASS — in the form of a clinical trial: KEYNOTE-158.
It took just 3 days for all the pain to disappear.
And my first scan confirmed I was cancer-free.
I had just walked the talk of the greatest minds alive today — and possibly achieved the fastest documented complete responses ever recorded in cancer.
This Cancer that nearly took me in the dead of night.
It shaped me, it shaped my path.
steveHOLMES
My brother and I were diagnosed with the same aggressive terminal cancer, with 6 months to live
I survived. Graeme did not.
My survival became part of a modern-day medical breakthrough — revealing a new pathway for how patients can respond to, and survive, even from the most serious of late-stage settings.
Surviving stage IV terminal cancer is remarkable in itself. It attracts attention — and with it, an unexpected responsibility.
Cancer patients suffer a lot.
That’s what it is to be a patient.
So anything I can do to reduce that suffering — to make life more liveable — is a good thing. A meaningful thing.
Sharing my battle-earned knowledge does exactly that.
It shines a light on what’s possible.
my walk with CHOLANGIO
Diagnosed with distal extrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma —the worst of GI survival rates
25 hours of multi-organ surgery, including a near-fatal post op hepatic artery aneurysm, at home with just minutes to spare.
But the cancer returned — fast, aggressive, widespread metastases across my liver and lungs. Too many to count.
Now late-stage, stage IV, with weeks — if not days — to live…
A LAST-MINUTE HAIL MARY PASS — in the form of a clinical trial: KEYNOTE-158.
It took just 3 days for all pain to disappear.
And my first scan confirmed I was cancer-free.
I had just walked the talk of the greatest minds alive today — and possibly achieved one of the fastest documented complete responses ever recorded in cancer.
This Cancer that nearly took me in the dead of night.
It shaped me, it shaped my path.
My Path Forward
What I Do
- I innovate and engineer systems to stop cancer — now.
- Lived experience is what works. I convert it into survival systems that deliver — today.
- You can’t advocate for victory — victory speaks for itself.
How We Win
To speak of change is commonplace.
To offer a solution is not enough.
To build it — and live inside it — that is how we win.
Claire aand I built a Patient-Led Response Culture —
a survival system in itself,
a force that innovates and executes — not advocates.
We created pathways for lived experience and patient expertise
to directly shape frontline survival outcomes.
We introduced accountability as our core measure:
We win by being accountable to today’s patient survival — today.
We engineer systems that deliver survival — not someday, but now.
We choose innovation and execution over ideology.
We choose action over appearance.
That’s how we win — not in theory, but in real time, every day.
Our Mandate
Everything must answer to this test:
“Does what we do — right now — benefit today’s patient, today?”
We didn’t survive to share an inspirational story.
We survived to live the opportunity life gives anyone willing to act.
Survival became a responsibility — to build something from it.
A patient-led culture that operates as a system that executes — not advocates. An infrastructure for patients to find their way to survival.
Our story had to become a system for survival.
Something others can build on.
That’s the opportunity we were given. That’s the real story — execution over advocacy.
Who I Am
I’m a rare survivor of late-stage cholangiocarcinoma (Bile Duct Cancer) — a cancer with a 3–5% survival rate. Mine was late-stage. The survival rate for that: 0%.
My rite of passage:
- 25 hours of life-threatening, multi-organ removal surgery
- A near-fatal aneurysm — minutes if not seconds from death
- Two experimental clinical trials — one, a last-minute Hail Mary
- I have walked the talk of the world’s greatest scientific minds — achieving one of the fastest documented complete responses ever recorded from such a late-stage cancer setting.
Why do I cycle?
Cancer took it from me. I took it back.
It’s where I think. Where I cut through the noise.
It’s where I filter the truth — and forge the breakthroughs.
It’s where “How We Win” is built.
Cycling, like life, demands persistence and perseverance.
It grounds my effort and connects me to the opportunity — life.
In the early days, it was an escape —
from ICU beds, from thoughts of dying.
Later, it became a space of vision —
a transformative workshop on wheels,
where everything I had learned could evolve into something greater.
More on what I do:
Chapters Of Me
The Story That Built A System
Show ME Don’t Tell Me.
Why Advocacy Failed Me — and Response Won
People often say to me:
“Steve, I don’t know how you do all this. You’re so passionate.”
My answer?
“It’s not how. It’s why I have to.
And you’re mistaking passion for perseverance.”
Passion is a luxury — born of time and choice.
Something cholangio patients don’t have.
Perseverance is different.
It’s not a feeling.
It’s a decision — sharpened by urgency, sustained by necessity.
Cancer is relentless.
I had to be just as relentless — until it was no more.
You don’t know how you’ll function until you’re forced to.
It’s a crash course in discovering who you really are.
What I learned surprised me.
There was a bold deliberation I didn’t know I had —
even as the emotional storm tried to take me down.
My creative persistence — once annoying to others — became an edge.
It kept drawing up paths where none existed.
And beneath it all, I had a quiet endurance —
an unshakable willingness that needed no validation.
Execution Over Optics.
Because I nearly drowned in a sea of care —
where it’s all care, and no responsibility.
Care that’s passive. Palatable.
That rewards compliance and punishes initiative.
It wasn’t response.
It wasn’t proactive.
And it wasn’t what Graeme needed — or what I needed.
That’s when I saw it:
Advocacy and awareness are just optics —
substitutes for the action patients need.
Optics — not execution — is the default operating system.
And for a while, I was just a deer in its headlights.
But the version of me that emerged from that fog?
He knew one thing with certainty:
It was up to me.
And that, I had full control over.
So I built what was missing.
Those harsh lessons didn’t just help me survive.
They shaped how I lead.
They shaped how I execute.
They revealed how to increase survival — in ways no traditional advocacy ever could.
Because at the edge of the cliff, you don’t need a story.
You need a system that holds.
Execution cuts to the bottom line.
Today’s patients need action.
Anything else is theatre.
Anything else just gets in the way.
Theatre Doesn’t Save Lives. Execution Does.
Am I an advocate? NO
Advocacy talks about tomorrow’s cure.
Its survival depends on that.
I deliver what works — today.
Because patients on the battlefield — their survival depends on that now.
RealityCheck
We are all healthy — until we’re suddenly not.
And cancer almost always arrives as a surprise.
It doesn’t care if you’re fit, strong, educated, or ready.
It arrives — uninvited, unannounced, and life-defining.
You can’t positive-think your way out of cancer.
But you can rebuild your way through it step by step.
When it hits, only one thing matters: how you respond.
Your response defines your outcome.
Own it. Fully. Don’t outsource that. Don’t delay it.
That’s the line between drowning in uncertainty
and building a system that holds.
I thought I was too healthy to get cancer. I wasn’t.
And I’ve since learned — that’s how we all think.
You can’t control that you have cancer.
But how you respond? That’s 100% in your control.
Change the Angle of Attack
To beat cancer, you must change how you see it.
Not as for its reputation. Not as a fate. But as a position — a problem to solve.
That shift dismantles its power.
It clears the way for you to respond — effectively, decisively.
Follow the Process.
The Process breaks cancer into winnable pieces.
Step by step. No overwhelm. No distraction.
You wear it down until it has nothing left.
That’s execution. That’s how we win.
Certainty Is A Mirage
In science — as in life — there is no certainty.
Only obstacles, and the possibilities they conceal.
Cancer is one of those obstacles.
But it’s not the end.
It’s a position — not a fate.
As Alfred D. Souza wrote:
“For a long time, it had seemed to me that life was about to begin — real life.
But there was always some obstacle in the way…
At last, it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life.”
That’s how you see cancer for what it is — not what you fear it is.
That’s when you break its grip.
That’s when the possibilities emerge.
And that’s when you act — turning them into reality.
The future of CANCER
Empower the patient — increase survival.
Empower their community — multiply it.
The empowered patient is the future.
They don’t survive care — they lead response.
They combine science, strategy, and will to outpace cancer in real time.
They don’t wait for breakthroughs.
They build them.
They don’t follow the science.
They push it forward.
That’s the future we’re building.
That’s not a vision. It’s a build plan.
~ Steve Holmes
Channel 7 News interviews Ben (fellow patient RIP) and myself
about a new clinical trial using a virus to target and destroy cancer.
It is our Choice
When you believe in cancer’s reputation more than you believe in your ability to respond and overcome it – which will triumph?
I Have Cancer I Am Going to Die
As Shakespeare wrote, “Nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
“I have cancer” is a fact.
“I’m going to die” — that’s an opinion, not a fact.
Clarity creates control.
Control builds response.
Response builds survival.
~ Steve Holmes
My Challenge
Separating the lessons learned from the emotions that encapsulated them has been a significant challenge. Initially, I sought to detach them for clearer communication. Yet, I realized that these emotions are not just carriers, but integral components of the lessons themselves. My challenge now lies in sharing these intertwined experiences in a way that offers tangible benefits
ContactME
For more information please contact me
Warm Regards Steve
- +61 415 153 522
- [email protected]
- Cholangiocarcinoma Foundation Australia