Surviving Childhood Leukemia in a Latin Culture: An Explorative Study Based on Young Adults’ Written Narratives

Making Cancer Visible: Unmasking Patients' Subjective Experiences

The Face of Cancer, an article and patient's painting published nearly 15 years ago, has contributed in significant ways to a body of research focusing on communication during oncology interviews. Impacts from this painting helped to create a sensitivity for analyzing naturally occurring video recordings, including moments when patients' subjective experiences are raised and responded to. Analysis begins with how a melanoma patient's facial expression bears striking resemblance to the painting, vocal and other visible social actions (e.g., gaze, gesture), and how patient's story about a friend's metastatic cancer reveals her primal fears and hopes about cancer. Actions displayed by other patients (breast, testicular, abdominal, and leukemia) are also examined to unmask how their faces and bodies make cancer visible, doctors' responses, and the complexities of how patients' stressful stories get constructed. Implications are raised for improving patient-provider relationships by offering more personalized care. Understanding how patients display their concerns and emotions, through spoken and embodied actions, enhances discernment about how best to provide tailored and supportive responses to patients' life-world experiences especially, but not exclusively, when dealing with the stresses and angst of cancer.

Adolescent and young adult cancer survivors narrate their stories: Predictive model of their personal growth and their follow-up acceptance

PURPOSE

Few studies have captured the unique ways in which cancer affects the growth and development of adolescent and young adult cancer survivors. This paper illustrates the daily life of childhood cancer survivors who are now adolescents and young adults, their post-traumatic growth and follow-up perceptions, adopting a narrative approach.

METHODS

One thousand adolescent and young adult cancer survivors, mean age at diagnosis being 9.26 years old (SD = 4.29) and current mean age of 19.28 (SD = 2.96), were interviewed in depth using a new version of Ecocultural Family Interview-Cancer (EFI-C), which has proved to be a psychometrically reliable instrument.

RESULTS

Post-traumatic growth was predicted directly by age at diagnosis and, indirectly, by the mediation of the health medical staff-patient relationship during the illness, hospitalization memories, and patient's narrating skills. Positive feelings towards follow-up visits were predicted by the health staff-patient relationship during the illness (Chi-Square = 2.87; df = 3, p-value = 0.41; RMSEA = 0.0001).

CONCLUSION

Adolescent and young adult cancer survivors who were older and had established strong relationships with health professionals at the clinic were more able to narrate their experiences, display a positive comprehension of the events with a pragmatic acceptance of the follow-up procedures. Relationships with health professionals should therefore be monitored and improved, both during the cancer treatment and in the off-therapy period. The narrative technique allows adolescent and young adult cancer survivors to reorganize and give shape to their traumatic experience.

Meaning-Making Process Related to Temporality During Breast Cancer Traumatic Experience: The Clinical Use of Narrative to Promote a New Continuity of Life

Previous research has agreed that meaning-making is a key element in the promotion of patients' well-being during and after a traumatic event such as cancer. In this paper, we focus on an underestimated key element related to the crisis/rupture of this meaning-making process with respect to the time perspective. We consider 40 narratives of breast cancer patients at different times of treatment, undergoing chemotherapy and biological therapy. We collected data through writing technique. We performed an interpretative thematic analysis of the data and highlighted specific ways to signify time during the different treatment phases. Our central aspect "the time of illness, the illness of time" demonstrates that the time consumed by illness has the risk of becoming an illness of time, which transcends the end of the illness and absorbs a patient's past, present, and future, thus saturating all space for thought and meaning. The study suggests that narrative can become a therapeutic and preventive tool for women with breast cancer in a crisis of temporality, and enable the promotion of new semiotic connections and a specific functional resynchronization with the continuity/discontinuity of life. This is useful during the illness and medical treatment and also after the treatment.