Charlotte Ann Syme
British Columbia Institute of Technology, Canada
Title: Learning to be a dying person: Being inside/outside cancer treatment
Biography
Biography: Charlotte Ann Syme
Abstract
This paper explores the author's dissertation where the question 'how does a person who is a cancer patient find their way to being a dying person?' Through the lens of modernism (Giddens) and discourse analysis (Foucault), the author examines how the institution of cancer control is constituted, and how the cancer patient is co-constructed by this system and people entering into it as people needing cancer treatment? From this perspective, the more solitary and less shaped experience of 'unbecoming a cancer patient' is explored for those cancer patients whose treatment has failed. The space between the expert systems of cancer control and palliative care is what is revealed and explored. Who is this liminal person and how might their needs in this space and at this time be met, perhaps without succumbing to the modernist temptation to create yet another expert system to manage this? This paper has implications for person centred system redesign.