Striving for Belonging: Migrant Patients’ Rehabilitating Efforts in Cancer Trajectories

Cancer illness and treatment disrupt the life course and existential foundation of patients and their families and evokes a wide range of rehabilitation needs and practices aimed at reestablishing the physical, mental, and social consequences of the disease and treatment. However, socioeconomic factors and language barriers that produce ethnic inequality in health also influence the conditions for cancer rehabilitation among patients with migrant background.
In a project aiming to improve elderly migrants’ cancer rehabilitation in Denmark, qualitative interviews with patients were conducted to explore their rehabilitation practices, needs, resources, and reflections to learn how health care professionals can support their rehabilitation during the cancer trajectory.
Patients describe a wide range of rehabilitating efforts aiming at restoring weakened bodies, minds, selves, and families and defining new roles, positions, and life trajectories in the aftermath of critical illness. In their narratives, patients also reflect upon their citizenship and relation to the welfare state, and they express how critical illness display the fragility of their position as legitimate citizens.
Drawing on anthropological perspectives on belonging, the analysis unfolds how patients strive to reestablish torn relationships and restore belonging within themselves, in their close social network and at nation state level.