Cancer survivorship—a framework for quality cancer care

Abstract

When diagnosed with cancer or any other life-threatening condition, people must negotiate 2 once-separate but now integrated realms—a medical care industrial complex and an everyday life now lived in conscious awareness of mortality—a state of being subject to death. Life becomes a series of challenges and disruptions to relationships, body image and integrity, autonomy and independence, life goals, hopes, and dreams for the future. Whether one physically, emotionally, or spiritually survives, thrives, or succumbs to cancer is dependent on a treatment plan that accounts for the multiple and varied ways in which people experience dual citizenship in the realms of the well and the sick. A theory of cancer survivorship that integrates both medical and patient perspectives into a cogent and coherent framework has the potential to enhance the quality of cancer care and the patient experience. “Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.. . . Although we prefer to use the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged . . . to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place” (1).