Living (well) with cancer in the precision era

Abstract

Surviving cancer in the precision era of targeted drugs and immunotherapies increasingly involves surviving-with malignancy. Against this backdrop of precision, innovation and chronicity, this paper offers a person-centred examination of some of the emerging intersections of chronic living and cancer treatment. Using a temporally extended qualitative methodology drawing on solicited diaries and successive in-depth interviews with people receiving precision cancer therapies, we focus on the often opaque worlds of surviving-with cancer, day-to-day, amidst the evolving scene of therapeutic innovation. Tracing how elements of the catastrophic and the mundane are braided through these everyday experiences, we seek to provide an embodied and temporally extended account of everyday life, beyond the binaries of presence/absence of disease, or of death/cure. In so doing, we consider how the normative expectations of treatment, bodies, care and emotions are being reshaped, elevating the moral work of the precision-cancer intersection.