The cancer may come back: experiencing and managing worries of relapse in a North Norwegian village after treatment^*

ABSTRACT

Little is known about how people living in the aftermath of cancer treatment experience and manage worries about possible signs of cancer relapse, not as an individual enterprise but as socially embedded management. One-year ethnographic fieldwork was conducted in a coastal village of under 3000 inhabitants in northern Norway. Ten villagers who had undergone cancer treatment from six months to five years earlier were the main informants. During fieldwork, the first author conducted qualitative, semi-structured monthly interviews with them, and participated in their everyday activities and relationships, including families, friends and co-villagers. In this article, we contemplate human emotions as arising in contexts of transactions, capable of creating social realities. By including this perspective, we highlight how people who recover from cancer construct and experience worry about possible relapse in relation to close family members, friends and co-villagers in the socially closely-knit and relatively isolated village. These emotional experiences emerge through relationships with others have communicative characteristics and take place in interaction with the social environment of their village. While informants attempt to protect family members by avoiding sharing worries with them, they express the need to share their worries within friendships. However, they experience both comfort and challenges in managing their worries in relation to acquaintances in the village. Overall, the study enhances understanding of the social embeddedness of emotions in everyday life, by revealing how worries of relapse of cancer configure and relate to various social contexts.

KEYWORDS:

• Anthropology of emotions
• relapse
• aftermath of cancer treatment
• Northern Norway
• worries

Ethical approval

The project addressed the sensory, emotional and relational aspects of patients’ illness experiences. This implied that patients and their significant others were vulnerable both during fieldwork and by being included in the analysis. Particular care and sensitivity were needed to protect and respect the patients’ integrity throughout the study. The research group worked specifically on these issues during the study. The 10 main informants provided informed consent and had the option to withdraw from the project at any point. They were assured that any information they provided would be treated with confidentiality and de-identified. All participant names have been changed.

Acknowledgments

Our thanks go to Dr Kate Hampshire (Department of Anthropology, Durham University, UK) for her contributions to the content of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Instead of using the term ‘cancer survivor’, which indicates an explicit state of cancer as belonging to the past, we chose to describe study participants as being ‘in the aftermath of cancer’. In this way, we emphasise the various challenges of the state after treatment.

2. Undisclosed due to anonymity.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Research Council of Norway [grant number 222144].