Description
As part of a broader data set of 100 patients, this paper maps out and details the trajectories of 10 Iraqi patients undergoing cancer care within Iraq and across borders before, during, and after the ISIS period. Due the the war-related barriers to access and the deterioration of health systems, Iraqis’ care-seeking trajectories are not linear but rather they often include private and public hospitals across numerous in-country and regional cities from Basra and Baghdad to Beirut and Damascus. The study provides a methodology for drawing connections between these dispersed clinical sites as well as the non-clinical spaces in which patients traveling for oncology receive help and support. The aim of the article is not merely to map out the locations of care in a spatial sense but also to tell the story of the illness journey and its social, psychological, economic and environmental dimensions. To this end, I include the voices of patients as they move across borders and engage the various struggles of life under chronic illness, displacement, and war. The ethnography of these journeys also includes the etiological associations various actors affected by the illness draw between the appearance of the disease and potential causal agents/incidents, including but not limited to remnants of munitions such as depleted uranium, the shock of bombs/blasts, and the unending grief of losing loved ones over the course of 3 decades of war. Building on the previous work on ‘therapeutic geographies,’ the study reshapes anthropological methods for engaging illness trajectories under conflict while simultaneously providing new tools for oncologists treating war-affected patient populations. A failure to understand the journey and the story of the illness prevents oncologists from having constructive and helpful conversations with patients around barriers to and expectations of care and healing.
