O enfermeiro desvelando as experiências cotidianas de pessoas colostomizadas por câncer: enfoque existencial

Abstract

The experience of a colostomy bag-carrying cancerous person constitutes the starting point of current research. Current analysis investigates the experiences of cancer-colostomized people and discloses their being-in-the-world with stoma and the use of a feces disposal bag. Heidegger's existential phenomenology is a help towards the understanding of their experience. Ten people living in the northern region of the state of Paraná, Brazil, were interviewed between January and April 2008, in their own homes. Research was approved by the Permanent Ethics Committee in Research with Human Beings of the State University of Maringá, Maringá PR Brazil. The following basic question was asked so that the subjects' discourses could emerge: What were the factors that changed your life style after the stoma surgery? Perceptions were recorded during the interviews and the daily vicissitudes experienced were reported through the subjects' corporality and silences. Convergent feelings were perceived in the interpretation of the interviewed people's discourse: anguish within the context of existential factuality; concern with the future; the importance of the family so thatthey could face their condition. These factors triggered the existential theme of the temporality of the colostomized being-in-the-world. Analysis disclosed that being-cancercolostomized means to have one's own being-in-the-world affected by physical, emotional and social modifications. The disease-imposed restrictions should be overcome so that new possibilities for continuing existing-in-the-world could be perceived. So that one may direct one's care towards the needs of colostomized people, one should go beyond the knowledge on physical and psychic changes and understand the experiences made up by these same people within their process of living with the disease.