Emotion Work during Colorectal Cancer Treatments

ABSTRACT

The emotional texture of colorectal cancer treatments in a British oncology clinic provides insight into the ways that patients, their relatives, and health professionals deal with the suffering that cancer poses. In cancer care, verbalizing emotional reactions is understood as a healthy way of dealing with troublesome emotions. Yet, a type of silence, here understood as “not getting upset in front of each other,” helps participants to preserve relationships. This idea contributes to our understanding of silence as a relational form of moral work that seeks to preserve the well-being of others.

KEYWORDS:

• UK
• colorectal cancer
• emotion work
• relational suffering
• silence

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the research participants who generously shared with me their experiences of living with cancer. Earlier drafts of this article benefited from generous feedback offered by Rosalie Allain, Tess Altman, Pauline Destree, Giulia Sciolli and Henry Llewellyn. Special thanks to two anonymous reviewers from Medical Anthropology and its chief editor, Lenore Manderson, for their constructive comments and for the patience with which they saw this article from first submission to publication.

Notes

1. Cancer survival rates across the globe vary widely for colorectal and other types of cancer, as it depends on stage at diagnosis, availability of treatments, and quality of registration and surveillance data of each country. Allemani et al. (2015: 1040) show that five-year survival in colorectal cancer ranges from 40% to 70% across 65 countries.

Additional information

Funding

Fieldwork for this research was made possible by a CONICYT Becas Chile [72150288].

Notes on contributors

Ignacia Arteaga Pérez

Ignacia Arteaga Pérez is a Philomathia research associate and an affiliated lecturer at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge. She is also a research fellow at Robinson College, Cambridge. Supported by the Chilean National Commission for Scientific and Technological Research (CONICYT), she obtained a PhD in Anthropology from University College London in 2018. Ignacia’s new research concerns the practices of multiple stakeholders involved in the fields of cancer detection in the UK.