Mulheres, câncer e abandono: uma experiência de estágio no HUOL

Abstract

The present study analyzes the work of care, understanding them in their historical conformation – in the sense that they were historically assigned to women – and apprehending the difference in the place of women as subject and object of care. Under this concern, it aims to analyze ambivalences and contradictions present in the care work developed by family members to cancer patients in a hospital environment, seeking to specifically understand the abandonment of women with malignant neoplasm (cancer) by their respective partners and spouses. From this background, the paper examines cases of abandonment of heterosexual women in the process of illness attended by the Oncology and Hematology Unit of the University Hospital Onofre Lopes - HUOL, discussing their abandonment by affective-sexual partners and, finally, describes the formation of a care network among women. The empirical data present in this work were obtained through notes in a field diary produced during the experience of a mandatory internship in Social Work, as well as through bibliographical and documentary research with a qualitative approach. The data obtained reinforce the assumption that in our sociability, historically, women were and are socially seen as subjects of care and, in turn, men are historically seen as objects of female care. It is in this sense that women do not seem to get the same attention from men that they give them when they are perhaps in the position of objects of care, often suffering from abandonment by their partners during treatment of serious illnesses, which leads them to depend often from a women's care network.