Abstract
This article presents the findings from a qualitative research project exploring eight women’s experiences of living with rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Through semistructured interviews, the women provided insights into the physical, emotional, and social impacts of RA and the “work” involved in negotiating its influence in the everyday life. In narrating their experiences of adapting to RA, the women express a common desire for “normalcy,” to return to a time and space before the disruption of RA. The women’s accounts also emphasized the interrelatedness between bodily experience and constructions of self, highlighting the corporeal nature of RA and the constant shaping and reshaping of personal meanings and values.
Highlights
Understandings of chronic illnesses such as rheumatoid arthritis (RA) have been dominated by a singular focus on physical symptomology and treatment options (Harrison, 2003; Reinseth & Espnes, 2007)
The emphasis on the “client’s” voice resonates with postmodernism’s valuing of both “situated” (Haraway, 1988) and subjective knowing (Trevithick, 2008) vital to personal empowerment. This situated knowing is as MacDonald (2008) suggests, integral to the collective empowerment of people living with chronic illnesses such as RA and the understandings of the broader community; the “experiences/stories of people withAbilities and sufferers of chronic pain need to be welcomed into the discourse on chronic pain, a discourse that has been predominately occupied by biomedicine” (p. 138)
There was an expressed desire to return to the known self, “the person they used to be.”. Such sentiments echo with Plach et al.’s (2004) research with women living with RA, who described themselves as “out of synch with who they had been . . . [and] . . . with who they had thought they would become in the future” (p. 145)
Summary
Understandings of chronic illnesses such as rheumatoid arthritis (RA) have been dominated by a singular focus on physical symptomology and treatment options (Harrison, 2003; Reinseth & Espnes, 2007). The emphasis on the “client’s” voice resonates with postmodernism’s valuing of both “situated” (Haraway, 1988) and subjective knowing (Trevithick, 2008) vital to personal empowerment This situated knowing is as MacDonald (2008) suggests, integral to the collective empowerment of people living with chronic illnesses such as RA and the understandings of the broader community; the “experiences/stories of people with (dis)Abilities and sufferers of chronic pain need to be welcomed into the discourse on chronic pain, a discourse that has been predominately occupied by biomedicine” The emphasis on “normalcy,” the impact of uncertainty, the focus on the body, and the contentions relating to adaption and adaptation provide examples of the multifaceted approach taken by the women to remake themselves In describing these processes, the women narrate their social and emotional experiences of “adapting” to RA, their negotiations of the negative thoughts threatening to overwhelm, and the energy required to “keep positive.”. The women narrate their social and emotional experiences of “adapting” to RA, their negotiations of the negative thoughts threatening to overwhelm, and the energy required to “keep positive.” The women’s accounts are a reminder of the deeply felt impacts of RA making it a “less ‘liveable’ condition” than other chronic illnesses (Wiener, 1975, p. 98)
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