Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
that address the
limbo situation
of having been told about the shadow
image of their brain and left to live with the 'boundary uncertainty' of
medicine. Most of those who have used the possibility to publish their
story on the homepage write about their suffering as well as about their
'decision' to go through an intervention. A young mother diagnosed with
a 'cold' aneurysm expresses her view on herself, her life and her health in
the following way:
I am the 31 year old mother of 3 little girls and a wife to my husband
Scott. In July I found out that I have a 4 mm wide neck aneurysm in my
brain and have had all the tests done since. Angiogram, 2 spinal taps,
MRI and a MRA done. Next week the 4th of September I head back to
my aneurysm specialist who will decide my fate so to speak.
I have been told that it is unlikely that my aneurysm will rupture,
about 1% chance per year, but I've apparently had it for 31 years so
doesn't that make it a 31% chance? Anyway, I am worried that my
neurologist will tell me to wait and have another MRI in a year ... this
has seriously changed my life. The quality of my life is not the same, I
run to the ER every time I get a headache, I live in constant fear that it
will rupture. I want it taken care of now, I don't want to wait around to
see if I'm going to be a statistic or if I end up having to have surgery 30
years from now when my body may not be so healthy.
This woman writes that she has been told that it is unlikely that her
aneurysm will rupture. Still she has tried on her own to calculate the risk
that this will happen. Without having observed the medical encounter in
this specifi c case, we cannot know what role the woman herself played in
the process which ended up with an intervention (according to her updates).
But if we consider the fear she expresses we can imagine that she has put
a lot of pressure to act on her medical doctors in the clinical encounter. In
their study, van der Schaaf
et al
. (2002) found that a number of different
indicators of health had changed, suggesting that the lives of the patients
had signifi cantly changed, despite the fact that none of them appeared to
have lost any abilities. It is possible to argue that the mere knowledge about
an aneurysm and the associated risks will transfer the patient into a state of
mind that we can call being 'at risk'.
Framing expectations: the social representation of aneurysm
as an embodied risk
Social science studies conclude that discourses about risk have become a
persistent part of life in modern culture and a dominant way to interpret who
gets sick and why (Lupton 1999). Lacking bodily evidence of risk we often
perceive our everyday state as a state of no risk (Kavanagh and Broom 1998),
but still, everyone is to some extent 'at risk' as Beck (1992) has pointed out.
