Incurable Invisible: Living with Advanced Disease in a Canadian Cancer Hospital
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis follows the lives of people who are diagnosed with a cancer that is unlikely to be cured. This means that even if patients receive one or multiple rounds of the standard treatments of chemotherapy, surgery and radiation, there is a high probability that they will still die from their disease. Incurable illness presents a particular problem due to a combination of cultural meanings and values, both within biomedicine and within society. Drawing on 17 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in one Canadian cancer hospital, working with patients with lung and gynaecological cancers, the dissertation answers the question: What is life like for patients with advanced cancer as they live with their disease, post-diagnosis? Although its focus is primarily on the patients, it also includes the experiences of doctors and nurses at the hospital, and patients’ family and friends.\nI explore some of the challenges and tensions produced from living with a diagnosis of advanced cancer. For example, patients are advised to ‘live in the moment,’ but this is a very challenging directive to follow as it is interlaced with the connotation that they are being entreated to do so because their futures are uncertain. Similarly, patients have to muster enough hope to be able to endure the emotionally and physically demanding treatments, but not so much hope that they believe that the treatments will actually cure them of their disease. These entreaties require them to straddle both the worlds of oncology and survivorship and the worlds of death, dying and palliative care, which my findings indicate is extremely difficult to withstand on a day-to-day basis. I argue that advanced cancer is a kind of ‘liminal’ space, an ambiguous territory that exists between the hope for a cure and the imminence of death. Patients’ ambiguous position is made even more challenging since contemporary cancer culture in North America tends to highlight only cancer survivors or people who have ‘lost their battles’ from cancer, rendering the struggles and experiences of patients who are living with advanced cancer but not currently dying from it, both culturally silent and invisible.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".