Off-time Illness: When Young Adults get Illnesses Associated with Old Age
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Date
2023-03-24
Authors
Norton-Smith, Kathryn
Journal Title
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Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
This dissertation explores the lived experiences of young adults with cancer through qualitative methods, including 40 in-depth interviews and participant observation. This dissertation extends sociological inquiry to an under examined population, young adults with cancer. This dissertation focuses on how age and life course state shape illness experience, with attentiveness to variations based on race, class, and gender. Young adulthood is socially constructed as a period of health, and cancer as a disease of old age. Such assumptions shape age-specific social support systems, medical practices, and perceptions of young adult bodies, impacting young adult experiences of illness. This manuscript analyzes themes of young adults’ experience of diagnosis. Young adults experience diagnosis as a multi-sited process encompassing self-diagnosis and professional diagnosis. A central theme in these accounts was the difficulty navigating the age-specific construction of young adulthood as a period of health and cancer as a disease of old age. Second, this project explores the experience of the body for young adults with cancer, focusing on the experience of aberration or out of placeness. Shaped by the institutional environment, aberration represents both the embodied experience of the young adult patient and the positionality of a young adult patient in medical knowledge. This aberration resulted in a loss of agency, especially regarding reproductive autonomy. A third research aim explores the impact of a cancer diagnosis on education, occupation, family formation, and the role of institutions in supporting or exacerbating this disruption. My findings demonstrate universal disruptions in education, occupation, and family formations. The timing of this disruption during the transitional period of young adulthood resulted in potentially long-term, cascading impacts. Finally, this project explores life after a cancer diagnosis. Young adults expressed uncertainty and a recognition of mortality independent of their health status. In response, young adults employ strategies informed by common sense narratives and ideologies, including bodily labor, family work, and support work.