Abstract
This study feeds into ongoing discussions on the metaphors used by cancer patients. Its aim is to explore how women living with a history of breast cancer use metaphors to express and interpret the experience of cancer remission. Data were collected in interviews designed to capture a rich and metaphorical description of participants' experiences with breast cancer and what these experiences mean to them. Ten participants were recruited. An interpretative phenomenological analysis of the participants' narratives highlighted a central metaphor: the cancer trace in one's life. The participants had to adapt to four specific traces of cancer: (1) the identity trace, (2) the existential trace, (3) the bodily trace, and (4) the narrative trace. We discuss how cancer challenges one's sense of biographical continuity and initiates a search for a new way of being. We also discuss how the metaphor of the trace differs from the metaphor of the cancer hero living without any trace of cancer.
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