How was life after treatment of a malignant brain tumour?

The malignant glioma is a severe disease with an unfavourable prognosis. Aside from a few case studies, the knowledge of the victimised patients’ lives from diagnosis to death is mainly restricted to studies assessing functional status and rating quality of life by means of questionnaires. From a clinician’s perspective this knowledge is not sufficient. By introducing the concepts ‘time of everyday life’ and ‘time of disease’, the purpose of this paper is to supplement with descriptive knowledge of clinical value. Twenty-eight patients with malignant gliomas and their spouses were followed during the course of the disease by repeated interviews. The time after treatment was then judged as representing, ‘time of everyday life’ or ‘time of disease’. Life after treatment turned out to be quite varied. To slightly more than a third of the patients’, life-continuity was lost, experiencing only ‘time of disease’. Among the others who were judged to experience ‘time of everyday life’ and who were of working age, nearly two-thirds were able to resume work or studies on a part-time basis. In the total sample, the mean ‘time of everyday life’ turned out to be nearly equal to ‘time of disease’, 6.1 and 5.4 months, respectively. The findings are illustrated by case descriptions and the conceptualisation of time into ‘everyday life’ and ‘disease’ is proposed as meriting further study.