On being a (future) statistic: Prognostication, visualisation and living-with advanced cancer

• In Event: Well Years, Good Years, Quality Years – Calibrations and Aggregations of Daily Living: Temporalities

Abstract

Cancer – one of the leading causes of death and disease worldwide – has widely divergent outcomes. Some cancer types have minimal impact on one’s life expectancy while others remain a virtual death sentence. As a result, relative survival chances feature prominently across the medical, cultural and lived experiences of cancer. In this paper, we explore how cancer survivorship is variously known, embodied and enacted in relation to the intertwined technologies of prognostic survival rates and visual imaging techniques. Drawing on qualitative interviews with people living with cancer, their carers and their health professionals, we explore participants’ experiences of prognosis, (dis)identification with medical images, and embodied experiences of living-with cancer. In dialogue with recent scholarship drawing attention to questions of ontology across the fields of medical sociology, medical anthropology and science and technology studies, we focus on the experience of being in relation to prognosis in the context of a future made precarious by the diagnosis of cancer. Quantified prognostic outlooks tend to collapse the distribution of survival experiences into coherent unitary entities – to predictions of ‘time left’ and to survival odds expressed as a percentage chance over (usually) five years. While such numbers are a pervasive feature of the contemporary landscape of cancer survivorship, little scholarship has so-far investigated the affective dimensions of knowing-the-future in this way. We explore how dominant cultural and clinical configurations of cancer survivorship often privilege the upper ‘hopeful’ limit of such survival curves, and obfuscate the multiplicity of how cancer survivorship is lived, felt and enacted.

Authors

• Katie Kenny, UNSW Sydney

• Alex Broom, UNSW Sydney

• Emma Kirby, UNSW Sydney