A Meeting with Persephone

Abstract

The experience of a life-threatening illness, such as cancer, throws the patient into a stark confrontation with the vulnerability of their own body. Treatment may present further challenges. The patient may be visibly and dramatically altered by surgery: the loss of a breast after a mastectomy, or the swelling of lymphoedema after removal of lymph nodes. Any new bodily reality brings an added dimension to the patient's process of adaptation to their illness. The author, a social worker in a women's hospital, offers this personal narrative of living with a temporary colostomy, a common procedure in bowel cancer. The experience taught her that a routine medical practice, an everyday event in any Oncology Unit, could simultaneously hold a profoundly deeper meaning for the patient. This narrative is offered in the hope that it may illuminate, for health practitioners, the experience of this common yet little-discussed procedure.