Living Suspended: Anticipation and Resistance in Brain Cancer

Abstract

Living with progressive disease is marked by flux and unpredictably and those affected navigate changing routines amid bodily and technical change. However, there are also moments of stasis or suspension where people wait around for the next transition, whatever it may be. These waits are often marked by nervous anticipation and the assembling of new imagined possibilities of what is to come. For people with a brain tumour, these imagined possibilities entail images of becoming lost to themselves and others through mental incapacity. Using ethnographic material collected over 18 months in a hospital specialist in the care and treatment of people with a brain tumour, our chapter focuses attention on these moments of suspension and the imagined possibilities which proliferate therein. It deals with the development of an anticipatory loss of self: a subjectivity and an interpretation of oneself—mind and brain—produced in the intersubjective encounters between people with a brain tumour, their families, clinicians, biomedical technologies, and the physical sensations that emerge as tumours develop and patients undergo intensive monitoring, surgery and therapies. It argues that this anticipatory loss of self is not merely an emotional state, but a mode of being that establishes a frightening imagined reality and through which one questions physical sensations, the nature of shared reality and ultimately one’s own capacity as a rational agent; that is, one capable of making significant decisions about care. Such focus on living in suspension and the imagined possibilities of becoming helps us better understand the dynamics of stasis and flux during progressive disease and ultimately what it is to ‘live in prognosis’ (Jain in Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us. University of California Press, London, 2013).