How cancer survivors experience their changed body encountering others

Psychosocial cancer research illustrates how women treated for breast cancer experience physical changes in their bodies and the way they perceive, that, others see their body. But how patients with other types of cancer have experienced changes in their bodies and how this affects their relationship with others is less researched.

To explore how cancer survivors with different types of cancer and cancer treatment, experience and handle their changed body, especially when meeting others, and how this influences their everyday life of survivorship, i.e. long after treatment has been completed.

Participant observation at a Cancer Rehabilitation Centre (CRC). Of the observed participants 23 were selected and interviewed twice.

Many participants had a changed body due to the cancer and its treatment. When the cancer survivors meet others they experience that their changed body means that they are avoided, looked at in specific ways, or greeted with a specific compliment. The verbal and nonverbal language that the cancer survivors are met with indicates the existence of a specific discursive aesthetic in relation to the disease and the changed body. This discursive aesthetic represents a silence and secrecy about cancer, which makes it impossible for survivors to talk about their experiences with cancer and a changed body.

The changed body not only represents the physical sign of cancer, it also represents the social presence and representation of cancer. The analysis gives an insight into general questions of meaning related to the changed body in late modernity.