The family experience of a person with diabetes mellitus and in treatment of hemodialysis

Abstract

The illness experience includes biological processes but also subjective processes that must be approached in the practices of health care. However reveal the subjective processes of the experience have been a challenge for health professionals. Interpretative anthropology has subsidized the understanding of this process as incorporating sociocultural aspects to illness. Study of qualitative nature, type Case Study aimed to understand the family experience of a person with diabetes mellitus, chronic renal insufficiency and in treatment of hemodialysis. The study was conducted with a user receiving hemodialysis treatment, registered at a clinic in the state of Mato Grosso and his wife, in the period from February to July 2008, through interview. Data analysis allowed us to learn that living the illness is an experience in which meanings are reconstructed and lived on the basis of previous experience and perspectives on life, making the family as reference. Important aspects of illness marked the experience of Moisés and his wife, for example the meaning attributed to the nuclear family, the fragmentation of the social structure, the limitations and restrictions, the effects of the disease in family life, the behaviors, the construction of male subjectivity and the renal transplantation.