ABOUT THIS BOOK

As a medical sociologist, Virginia Adams O’Connell long studied the healthcare system and people navigating illness. Then, in 2019, she confronted her own reality of being diagnosed with primary bone lymphoma. “Since my diagnosis, I joined a club of current and past patients that I never wanted or intended to join,” she writes with both candor and poignancy, adding, “But we can collectively work to make it the best club it can be.”

In the course of diagnosis, treatment, and recovery, Adams O’Connell lived through theories she had researched and applied her sociological ideas to help make sense of her personal experiences. Remission Quest chronicles how the reality of living with cancer changed her perspective on what she had studied. Adams O’Connell found her knowledge illustrated and enriched her sociological analysis of our medical institutions and that her own illness narrative shone new light on her theories.

With moving prose, Remission Quest captures the emotions of having cancer and dealing with elaborate medical systems, learning how to be a “good patient” while also managing indescribable fear and fatigue, and confronting questions about the meaning of life. Adams O’Connell’s experiences are both personal and universal. They provide inspiration, compassion, and understanding.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Virginia Adams O’Connell is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Moravian University and the author of Getting Cut: Failing to Survive Surgical Residency Training.

REVIEWS

“Adams O'Connell reflects on her experience of primary bone lymphoma through the dual lens of sociological analysis and personal illness narrative. Drawing on both perspectives, the book explores what happens when lived experience becomes an object of sociological inquiry…. O'Connell tells her story with an eye for detail that is both unmistakably personal and unmistakably sociological…. The book can be seen not only as an exercise in sociological imagination but also as an intellectual practice of working through illness…. Remission Quest offers…an opportunity to see theory, research, and lived experience in continuous conversation.”—Sociology of Health and Illness

“With touching candor and a perceptive eye, sociologist Virginia Adams O’Connell invites us into her personal experience of cancer. Treating the reader as she would a close friend, she tells of her fears, her pains, her moments of weakness, and her moments of triumph. So intimate and insightful is her prose that we don’t even notice how seamlessly she weaves in lessons from medical sociology, bioethics, public health, and folklore. Every cancer patient, healthcare provider, and budding social scientist will gain from the wisdom and humanity—and bravery—of Dr. Adams O’Connell’s story.”—Paul Root Wolpe, Raymond F. Schinazi Distinguished Research Chair in Jewish Bioethics and Founding Director of the Center for Peacebuilding and Conflict Transformation at Emory University

“An outstanding example of a keen sociological imagination at work. Virginia Adams O’Connell is a born storyteller and a sophisticated medical sociologist. In Remission Quest, Adams O’Connell tells her own story. But this is more than just a personal, autoethnographic account told by a careful observer. Throughout, Adams O’Connell’s insightful analysis focuses on the social structural and human complexities of cancer diagnosis, living with uncertainty, navigating the healthcare system, healthcare provider–patient relationships, and peer relationships. Remission Quest updates our understandings of the experience of cancer and refines core medical sociological topics in important ways.”—Andrew S. London, Professor in the Department of Sociology at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, and coeditor of Life-Course Implications of U.S. Public Policies

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Pursuing the Diagnosis

2. Adopting the Sick Role and Interpreting the Prognosis

3. The First Outpatient Infusions

4. Adjusting to Physical Changes

5. Role Strain and Fatigue with a Capital “F”

6. Being a “Good Patient”

7. The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad War Metaphors Used to Describe the Cancer Experience

8. The Challenges of Interacting with Family, Friends, Neighbors, and Acquaintances and Responding to “How Are You?”

9. Touch and Treatment

10. Inpatient Infusions

11. Intimate Strangers

12. The Last Infusion, Ringing the Bell, and Posttreatment Damage and Anxiety

13. Belonging to a Club You Never Wanted to Join—A Virtual Support Community

14. Returning to Work and Then, the Pandemic

Conclusion

Notes

Index

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