On waiting, hauntings and surviving: Chronicling life with cancer through solicited diaries

Abstract

The ‘typical’ trajectory of a person with cancer has been from diagnosis, through treatment, and towards cure (life) or the end of life (death). Yet, cancer survivorship as a social practice is no longer contained by such neat categorisations. Much of the lived experience of cancer now centres on: living with, rather than beyond, disease; the perpetuity of treatment rather than the spectre of disease; and, making sense of incurability. Using a solicited diary methodology, in this article the authors seek to chronicle life with cancer for those living in the in-between – the often-overlooked lives of incurable survivors. In the analysis of survivors’ diaries, the authors argue for an emphasis on the phenomenology of waiting and sociological exploration of how clinical prognostications affectively haunt the present. This, they posit, will further sociological understandings of the lived experience of affliction and care, especially within relations of chronicity and perpetuity, in this case focusing on advanced cancer and the steadily changing oncological milieu.

The collective/affective practice of cancer survivorship

“…For example, in the well‐worn trope that ‘we’re all in this together’, we see an intensification of collectivity (we), a unification of experience as singular (this) and alignment (we/this/together). Yet this implicit emphasis on collectivism and unification as coherent, masks the complexity, tensions, and contradictions therein (Broom, Kenny and Kirby ; Kenny et al ). As Ahmed argues, emotions work in this way, ‘by sticking figures together (adherence); a sticking that creates the very effect of a collective (coherence)’ (: 119).…”

“I Never Saw a Future”: Childhood Trauma and Suicidality Among Sexual Minority Women

“…These experiences would set the scene for much of life to come. They discussed a specter of broken ties and feelings of misrecognition, being disallowed truth telling, and a generalized relation of Othering to the norm—ripples through time, not only present in their current life but also influencing their hopes for the future and fundamentally shaping the trajectory toward suicidality (Broom, Kenny, & Kirby, 2017; Salway & Gesink, 2018). In addition, the life course of the women often seemed to reinforce and reproduce the mis-recognition of past gone by, with lifestyles and addictive/self-destructive practices reproducing the (misrepresentations of the) past as the individual’s life and responsibility.…”

From Provision of Information, Through Activation, to Changing the Social World. The Amazonki Associations as a Source of Comprehensive Support for Women with Breast Cancer

“…It is also more and more often said that patients' organizations help in coping with "the art of waiting", i.e. life in uncertainty, which is difficult to bear on one's own, as being in a group facilitates acceptance of survivorship which is still uncertain (Broom, Kenny, Kirby 2018).…”