Cancer Patients’ Experience Concerning the Rupture of Lifeworlds and the Continuity of Social Intersubjectivity

Cancer is a social phenomenon with plural social realities arising from the experience and comprehension of people engaged with it. This research is conducted based on 43 in-depth, semi-structured interviews (with 10 cancer patients, 10 family members, and 23 healthcare staff including nurses, oncologists, psychiatrists, and psychologists) in Isfahan’s major cancer treatment center. The approach of the study is phenomenology accommodated by interpretive sociology, the method is basic qualitative research, the sampling technique is purposive combined with complementary, and the analytical technique is thematic analysis. The analysis of people’s narratives is conductive to five themes of dealing with cancer from laxity to subjectivity, patient’s bodily objectivity in redefining the daily life order, the binary of home/hospital and the patient’s spatial and social bewilderment, patient’s alienation under the other’s authority of the physician, and patient as an integrated whole in the nursing care system. Overall, while the Iranian narrative has its own particularities, it complies with the universal intersubjective comprehension of cancer in which the dominant intersubjective construct about cancer is rather shaped by the popular comprehensions (Reconstructing the basic idea of cancer as death and mortality) than the physicians’ authority.