THE FAMILY REALIZING THE PROCESS OF GETTING SICK OF CANCER AND CREATING MEANINGS

Abstract

This paper pursued the understanding of a family’s perception facing one of its components getting sick of cancer and the symbolic meaning of this disease to the family. It starts from a field research, with a qualitative approach, having the Symbolic Interactionism as referential. It was performed both at the hospital and at the relative’s homes. Data collection was performed through a participating observation and some elements of ethnoscience have been used in its classification. After being interpreted, data allowed to perceive that the family, when facing to the diagnosis of cancer, transcends that concrete situation and creates to itself a world full of significance. In this context, symbolic elements appear associating cancer to ideas of an incurable, hard to face, invasive, proliferating, debilitating and terminal disease, whose origin can be associated to chastisement and fatality. Those feelings still appear when the family’s speech lets show the will of not directly speak the word cancer when talking about the matter, using a language different from the usual one. Those symbolic representations related to the disease make reality subjective and abstract interpretation, causing different ways of interpretating the disease. We can see that it is necessary to stop mystifying the disease to give all involved relative’s lives a new significance.

Keywords

• Family
• Health-disease process
• Nursepatient relations