The Ontology of Oncology: Navigating Cyborgs and Assemblages Through Cancer Treatment

ABSTRACT

Through narrative, the subjective experience of illness offers a corrective to biomedicine’s interpretive grip. Narrative is both process and product and illness narratives, in particular, are examples of embodied research. This ecopathography – drawing upon embodied experiences of treatment and recovery from late stage Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma – enlists Haraway’s cyborg and Lupton’s digital assemblage in an effort to make broader claims about patient care in the United States, and specifically, the role of technology in healthcare and in the construction of patient identity. A surgically implanted port (facilitating blood draws and the delivery of chemotherapy) and the patient portal (representing the results of those blood draws as well as a medium for communication) provide a foundation for how cyborgian assemblages both assist and trouble the cancer experience. At stake is the fluidity and ambiguity of boundaries (human/machine, human/animal, and physical/virtual) and the management of those boundaries with regard to patient care.

KEYWORDS:

• autoethnography
• chemotherapy
• dualisms
• ecopathography
• embodiment
• lymphoma

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Laura Ellingson, Nicole Defenbaugh, Elissa Foster, Craig Klugman, and Jill Yamasaki for helpful feedback, gentle suggestions, firm edits, and boundless encouragement. An earlier version of this essay was presented at the 8^th International Health Humanities Conference in March 2019. I regret I did not record the name of an audience member at that presentation who pointed out the application of Haraway’s cyborg regarding Rituximab. I am grateful for that insight.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.