[Patients' coping strategies during radiotherapy]

Cancer is a disease that entails inquiries and a wide range of problems for persons going through this experience, inevitably leading to stress, which is part of human life. There are different ways of adapting to a situation to cope with the stress. What makes a difference in this context are the coping strategies, defined as a process used to control the demands of the relationship between individual and environment, to be elaborated by the individual. In this study, we tried to identify the forms used to cope with the disease and treatment. This is a qualitative study, using Collective Subject Discourse Analysis and the theoretical framework of coping. Sixteen radiotherapy patients were interviewed as part of a convenience sample. When faced with cancer and radiotherapy, the patients elaborated coping strategies that were based on emotion as well as on the problem.