THE DIAGNOSTIC PROCESS AND THE BOUNDARIES OF NORMALITY

This article illustrates a group of cancer patients' descriptions and explanations of their experiences of health care encounters involving professional and lay processes of diagnosis related to definitions of normality. An interdisciplinary approach, representing nursing and med ical anthropology, has been used in attempting to better understand da ta derived from semistructured interviews with 46 persons diagnosed wi th cancer in the greater Stockholm area and with 29 of their significa nt others. We argue that people in this study fend to deaf with disrup tive situations by attempting to construct order. In the stories prese nted by these cancer patients, a diagnostic process becomes evident in which patients first become ''nonnormal'' within a popular framework and fates meet positive criteria to become ''normally diseased'' with the legitimization this provides. We thus see a way for the involved a ctors to deal with potentially difficult situations by redefining the concept of normality.