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MEET
Lyanne
Certified Counsellor
When someone hears the words 'you have cancer', the impact reaches far beyond the physical. There are scans and appointments, treatment decisions and side effects. But there is also fear. Uncertainty. Changes to relationships, work, finances, identity and the future someone thought they knew.
For Lyanne Westie, a certified counsellor who leads emotional wellness programming with Save Your Skin Foundation, supporting those less visible parts of the cancer experience isn’t an optional addition to medical care. It is an essential part of caring for the whole person.
“There was a time before cancer and there’s a time after cancer,” Lyanne says. “It’s a huge transition. It’s a new way of being in your life.”
Lyanne has a particularly personal connection to Save Your Skin. She is the niece of SYSF founder Kathy Barnard and was in her twenties when Kathy was first diagnosed with melanoma. Over the years, she watched the Foundation grow from Kathy’s experience into a national community supporting patients and families across Canada.
As that community grew, so did the recognition that people navigating cancer needed more than information and advocacy. They also needed places where they could simply be seen and heard.
“When there are huge transitions, that uncertainty, that change, that discomfort in the body - it necessitates strategies, support, community,” Lyanne explains.
Caring for the whole person
Cancer care understandably places enormous emphasis on the medical: understanding the disease, choosing treatments and managing symptoms. But a diagnosis touches virtually every aspect of a person’s life. Lyanne sees emotional wellness as one piece of a much larger system of care.
A medical team may address the biology of cancer, while counselling, peer support and wellness programs can create space for anxiety, distress and the emotional realities that may not fit into a medical appointment.
Patients and those who love them may share many of the same fears: uncertainty, anxiety and helplessness, but experience them from very different perspectives. A caregiver may be frightened of losing someone they love or overwhelmed by the responsibility of supporting them, while feeling unable to say those things aloud to the person who is sick. Both need places where difficult feelings can exist without judgment.
“The needs might be the same, but how you meet those needs might be a little bit different. There are different versions of helplessness.”
Living with uncertainty
If there is one theme Lyanne hears repeatedly in the cancer community, it is uncertainty. There is uncertainty while waiting for scan results, uncertainty about treatment, uncertainty about the future. But it doesn’t end there.
“What does this mean for my body? What does this mean for my finances and occupation? What does this mean relationally?” she says. “It really does come with the unknown.”
A cancer diagnosis can suddenly make familiar parts of life feel unfamiliar. Someone may no longer have the energy to do the things they once enjoyed, or may simply fear they won’t. Work may change. Relationships may change. Financial pressures may emerge.
“The world doesn’t look the same from that moment when that diagnosis happens,” Lyanne says.
And at exactly the moment someone is being asked to cope with profound change, they may also be expected to learn an entirely new set of coping strategies. That realization helped shape the wellness programming Lyanne has developed with Save Your Skin.
During her own experience with a significant medical issue several years ago, she remembers encountering advice to use tools like breathing exercises when she felt overwhelmed. The advice was sound, but learning a new technique while already deeply distressed felt like one more task.
“One more thing when it’s already hard enough to get up and brush your teeth,” she remembers thinking.
That experience helped inspire a simpler approach: rather than telling someone to go learn how to meditate, journal or breathe through distress, create a space where they can simply show up and be guided through it.
“Show me. Sit with me and do these practices,” she says. “Where’s the space where I can get some of that mental load off of my shoulders?”
Creating a space to simply show up
That philosophy is at the heart of Save Your Skin’s Wellness Wednesday sessions. Participants don’t need experience with mindfulness or meditation. They don’t need to research techniques or find the right video online. They can arrive as they are and spend half an hour being guided through a practice.
“They just come and try it on,” Lyanne says. “They get to actually try it without having to go through the whole mental load.”
There is also something powerful about doing that work together. Even online, Lyanne sees value in creating what she describes as a co-regulated space: a place where people experiencing fear, stress or uncertainty can spend time with others in a calm environment.
The goal isn’t to eliminate difficult emotions. They are natural responses to an extraordinarily difficult experience. Instead, wellness practices can help turn down their intensity. Lyanne describes it as “turning the volume down.” Small practices throughout the day may help someone meet the next stressful moment from a calmer baseline. They might go from a four to a six, rather than already being at a six and immediately climbing to an eight or ten.
What does ‘Hope’ really mean?
Hope has been at the heart of Save Your Skin since its earliest days. But for someone facing a frightening or uncertain diagnosis, the idea of “staying hopeful” can sometimes feel impossible. Lyanne offers another way of understanding it.
“Hope is not definitive,” she says. “Hope isn’t saying, ‘Yes, I’m going to be okay. Everything’s going to be fine,’ because we don’t actually know that.”
Instead, hope leaves room for uncertainty.
“Hope allows for that grey area in the middle. I don’t know if it’s going to be okay. I also don’t know definitively that it isn’t going to be okay.”
For Lyanne, that uncertainty itself creates possibility. Hope doesn’t require pretending fear, grief or despair aren't present. In fact, she believes acknowledging those feelings can make more room for hope.
When someone is frightened but feels they shouldn't be frightened, enormous energy can go into fighting that emotion. Having a place to name the fear, to say, I'm scared and have someone truly hear it, can loosen its grip. That can make it possible to notice what else is present alongside it: a supportive friend, a meaningful conversation, a moment of calm, a connection with someone who understands.
“The more we genuinely are offered space to be with the experience we’re having, the more we get to see the fullness of the experience,” Lyanne says. “Hope is in possibility.”
Sometimes, we need other people to hold that hope for us. When someone cannot access their own sense of hopefulness, a family member, friend, counsellor, support group or community can continue reflecting possibility back to them until they are able to see it again. In that sense, hope isn't simply something a person either has or doesn't have. It can be cultivated.
Letting patients be the experts
Working with people affected by cancer has also taught Lyanne an important lesson about what it means to provide meaningful support: expertise does not mean having all the answers.
“They reminded me that I don’t know,” she says.
A counsellor or wellness provider may understand theories and strategies for managing distress. A physician may have deep medical expertise. But neither knows exactly what it feels like to be the individual sitting in front of them.
“I don’t know what they’ve been through. I don’t know what they’ve tried. I don’t know all the incredible resources they have and strategies they’ve built across their lifetime.”
That means support begins with curiosity rather than assumption. It is a philosophy that reflects Save Your Skin's patient-led roots. Every cancer experience is different because every person enters it with a different history, family, community, set of resources and understanding of what matters most to them.
Looking for where the compassion is
One moment in Lyanne's work with Save Your Skin continues to stand out. While preparing a wellness component for an ocular melanoma program, she began looking at the cancer community through the lens of compassion-focused therapy. Compassion, she explains, involves recognizing suffering, understanding our shared humanity and being moved to bring support. Through that lens, she began seeing compassion everywhere.
It was in the Foundation connecting patients with resources. It was in social workers bringing people together. It was in nurses and physicians caring for patients. It was even in research. The years of work being undertaken in the hope of reducing suffering and creating better options for people in the future.
“There are so many levels and layers, from the foundations to the doctors,” she says. “There’s a drive to reduce suffering.”
That doesn't erase the very real frustrations patients experience within the healthcare system. But it offers another perspective: behind a strained system are often people who entered their professions because they wanted to help, and they themselves may be carrying enormous emotional burdens. For Lyanne, recognizing that shared humanity is another way of widening the lens.
“Look for where the compassion is. Look for where the help is coming from.”
Twenty years after Kathy Barnard's diagnosis inspired the beginnings of Save Your Skin Foundation, that compassion now takes many forms: advocacy, education, patient support, treatment access, community, and resources designed to support emotional wellness. Because living with cancer isn't only about treating disease. It's about helping people live inside uncertainty, giving them space to be honest about what they're experiencing, and reminding them that even when the future isn't certain, possibility remains. And sometimes, when a person can't hold onto that possibility themselves, community can hold it for them.